Scott Bessent is the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury in the second Trump administration (January 2025–present). In March 2026 he assumed the White House AI policy portfolio jointly with Susie Wiles following the departure of David Sacks as White House AI czar. His AI-related activity has centered on the financial-sector dimension of AI policy, including a meeting with Dario Amodei on April 17, 2026 and a summit with major U.S. banks on April 16, 2026 over the cybersecurity exposure associated with Anthropic's Mythos cyber-capability case.
Role in U.S. AI policy
According to May 4, 2026 New York Times reporting (Mickle, Barnes, Frenkel, Volz), Bessent and Wiles stepped in to fill David Sacks's role when Sacks left the White House AI position in March 2026, and have told people outside the administration that they plan to have a larger hand in shaping AI policy (Source: nytimes.com). The same reporting positions Bessent as a business-pragmatist counterweight to the more ideological wing of the administration, contrasting him with Sacks's departure and with Defense Secretary Hegseth's "ideological lunatic" comment about Amodei.
Bessent and Wiles are reported to be among the architects of a proposed working-group executive order on pre-release vetting.
His role extended to the vetting-body design itself. Bloomberg reported on July 17, 2026 that the administration was considering a FINRA-like watchdog to vet top AI models, developed with Bessent, which would report to the SEC and was under review by Wiles — the governmental counterpart to the industry-funded Standards Body proposed three days earlier by Demis Hassabis (A Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age (Hassabis, July 2026); bloomberg.com). The SEC reporting line places the proposal within Bessent's own portfolio rather than Commerce's.
Response to the Mythos cyber-capability case
Bessent's first sustained AI engagement came through the federal response to Anthropic's Mythos cyber-capability case in April 2026. On April 16 he convened the largest U.S. banks for talks about Mythos's potential cyber-capabilities, which were then being framed as having the potential to "lead to a cybersecurity 'reckoning'" (Source: Economist, April 16, 2026) — an early instance of Treasury involvement in the response.
The following day Bessent and Wiles met with Dario Amodei at the White House, focused on returning Anthropic's technology to government use following the Pentagon–Anthropic supply-chain-risk dispute. Both sides later described the meeting as "productive" (Source: nytimes.com). The meeting preceded the May 2026 administration shift toward pre-release vetting and the announced CAISI pre-release-evaluation expansion.
Treasury-side AI engagement
Bessent's Treasury portfolio intersects with AI policy along several lines. Treasury's cybersecurity-protection mandate, exercised through bodies such as the FFIEC and OCC, is being reframed around frontier-AI offensive-cyber risk. The Treasury Secretary's authority also touches agentic-finance applications, including Anthropic's May 5, 2026 financial-services agents and the FIS Financial Crimes AI Agent launch. Treasury's regulatory posture on OpenAI's planned IPO sits within the broader White House recalibration; per Brockman trial testimony, OpenAI's 2026 compute spend was stated at $50 billion.
Public positioning
Bessent's public AI commentary has been more restrained than Sacks's. During the Mythos period he declined to publicly defend or attack Anthropic, framing the Treasury portfolio in risk-management terms.
On July 21, 2026, Bessent said the US supports open-source AI but "we have the ability to sanction" overseas models that steal from US companies via distillation — a Treasury-enforcement framing of the distillation dispute that had previously been argued mainly in export-control and legislative terms — citing "watermarks" of U.S. models found inside Chinese ones (Source: cnbc.com). In a follow-up post on X he warned that "sanctions and Entity List designations will be on the table" for "covert, industrial-scale distillation attacks" (Source: x.com). See Adversarial Distillation.
Relationships
- related: Susie Wiles — joint AI portfolio holder.
- related: David Sacks — predecessor in the AI portfolio.
- related: Dario Amodei — April 17 White House meeting.
- related: Donald Trump — administration principal.
- related: AI Pre-Release Vetting — Bessent and Wiles are reported to be among the architects of the proposed working-group EO.
- related: Claude Mythos Preview — Treasury convened banks April 16 over Mythos cyber exposure.
- deploys-in: Financial Services — AI Deployment — Treasury jurisdiction.
Sources
- "White House Considers Vetting A.I. Models Before They Are Released" — NYT, May 4, 2026 (Source: Raw Sources/White House Considers Vetting A.I. Models Before They Are Released.md).
- (Source: nytimes.com) — April 17 Wiles+Bessent+Amodei meeting.
- (Source: Economist, April 16, 2026) — Bessent summons banks on Mythos.