I think people are lying to eachother in the White House.
In the hours since the below story came out, both Musk and Zuck have denied involvement.
I don't see why Musk or Zuck would lie about that, and it seems implausible that BOTH of them would do so. I also don't see why the 3 sources would lie to WaPo; it's too easy to catch the lie, and being caught means no longer being trusted as a source.
And if Musk and Zuck really weren't involved, but 3 sources really believed they were, then it seems like someone within the Trump administration is feeding misinformation to others in the administration.
I'm struggling to come up with other explanations here. Maybe the information got passed through a long chain of people, and accidentally distorted, like in a game of telephone? But then why would Semafor and WaPo both refer to the sources as "people familiar with the matter?"
It's also not that hard to think of reasons for someone to lie about this within the admin, given the reports of an ongoing internal fight about the executive order. It might be advantageous, at least in key moments, to make members of the opposing faction falsely believe that your own faction has the active support of powerful people like Musk and Zuckerberg.
I hope I'm wrong about this! It's incredibly important to make the right calls for AI policy, and those calls should be based on well-informed arguments, not lies and political scheming.
