A man in a grey suit and rimless glasses bends forward behind a cluster of press microphones with both arms spread wide, mouth open mid-sentence, looking at none of the three small toy figures around him. One with an iridescent head stands with folded arms watching him, one with an orange sunburst head holds a sheet of paper up at the microphones, and one with a blue star head in a beanie and mask walks away carrying a sack.
Illustration.

Three reasons Bessent would be the wrong man for the job

He has not been named to it, and the case against him is not that he is unqualified.

A czar is not an agency

What the labs asked for was independent verification — outside evaluators with standing to look inside a company, which is the provision of the bipartisan FRONTIER Act OpenAI endorsed. A czar is appointed by the President, serves at his pleasure, and holds whatever authority he still holds on Thursday.

Treasury would decide the close calls, and it has an instinct

Scott Bessent got into AI policy because banks told him their own systems were exposed — Semafor's reporting, and a real risk that lands squarely on Treasury. That is also the whole problem. Treasury reads everything through market function and American competitiveness, so a harm that never reaches a balance sheet does not register at all. Nobody has to be acting in bad faith for that to happen; it is the only instrument in the room. And every call worth worrying about is one where safety costs money.

It would put three jobs on one desk

In a single week:

  1. He proposed an AI incident notification mechanism to China.
  2. He refused the industry a federal liability shield — "it is humans who are responsible, not the AI."
  3. He was reported as the frontrunner to take the job overseeing all of it — Semafor, on three unnamed sources, with White House spokesman Kush Desai calling any reporting on unannounced personnel decisions "baseless speculation." Michael Kratsios and Scott Kupor were named as also in the mix, and Semafor notes the President is known to favour dark horses.

Negotiator, referee and regulator in one person. One point of failure, and one office to lobby.

Mr. Bessent, you would be the right man for any one of those three jobs. Pick one.

There is no ignorance, there is knowledge.