President Donald Trump’s AI-friendly administration has cast U.S. leadership in the technology race—particularly against China—as the priority, dismissing alarms from industry figures and others about advanced AI as a “hoax.”¹

That backdrop shaped Kevin Hassett’s appearance on CNBC’s Squawk Box on Tuesday. The National Economic Council director was asked about calls to slow AI development, safety concerns and whether a consensus on regulation could be reached.² His answer was blunt: “I think these are completely solvable problems.”¹

Hassett’s central argument was not that government should vanish from the field, but that it should resist expanding its role. “These are solvable problems, and the private sector is the right place to solve them,” he said, adding that the government should watch closely and deploy law enforcement when firms fail to act responsibly.¹

That places the White House on the opposite side of a growing push from some industry officials and members of Congress for stronger formal guardrails. The administration’s position, reflected in CNBC’s framing of Hassett’s interview, is that Trump “wholeheartedly rejects” a government takeover of AI regulation.³

The pro-industry case was echoed on X in a repost shared by Hugging Face chief executive Clément Delangue: “Why do you need the government to stop AI progress inside your private company when you are the CEO of the company already?”clem 🤗 (ClementDelangue)⁴ It captures the dispute in miniature: whether company leaders can police a transformative technology themselves—or whether the public cannot afford to take that on trust.