Government Deals and a Palace Dinner: Scale AI’s Billionaire CEO Eyes Grander Stage In Politics
Alexandr Wang has positioned the valuable startup to become a key partner for the Trump administration.
Just a day before a major AI summit in Paris commenced last month, the event’s organizers made a sudden addition to the speaker lineup: Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old billionaire co-founder and CEO of Scale AI, a startup that specializes in fine-tuning and assessing the quality of AI models for both private companies as well as the U.S. government.
Wang spoke at a closed-door session requiring security clearance titled “Fuelling trustworthy AI innovation through collaboration between industry & government,” and during his panel’s discussion, he declared that public-private partnerships like the ones he has keenly pursued represent “the future of AI.”
Later that day, Wang attended a private dinner at the Élysée Palace hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron along with around 150 other guests, including Vice President JD Vance, foreign heads of state and other tech leaders like Sundar Pichai and Demis Hassabis. Only a few attendees were asked to give remarks to the group, said a person who went to the dinner, and Wang was one of them. He talked about growing up near a place forever marked by world-altering technology—he’s from Los Alamos, New Mexico—and also discussed how AI would play a growing role in defense.
Wang, who wouldn’t comment for this story, has reiterated the pitch for combining AI companies and the public sector again and again lately in a whirlwind marketing tour stretching from D.C. to Davos. It seems like his spiel is going over well. Scale is currently negotiating a big new Defense Department contract, according to a source familiar with the discussions, and on the same day of Wang’s panel in Paris, Scale announced a new partnership with the U.S. AI Safety Institute, making it the first private company to evaluate frontier AI models for possible risks alongside the U.S. government.
And in yet another sign of Scale’s growing presence in politics, Michael Kratsios, a former top Scale executive, is set to shortly win congressional confirmation as the new director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. (Kratsios is an old face in Trump world: He left a job at Thiel Capital in 2017 to spend four years in the first Trump administration.)
As Wang maneuvers closer to Washington, he joins a crowded group of Silicon Valley leaders trying to align themselves with President Donald Trump, influence policy and secure lucrative government contracts. In some ways, it is classic Wang: He has long been skilled at extending his network and tying his fortunes to powerful friends, like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and customers like OpenAI as well as Meta Platforms, Microsoft and Cohere. Those customers pay Scale to help refine their AI, and much of that work is done by low-wage contractors overseas.
Wang has been adept at shifting his company’s focus within the AI industry several times, and he seems to see the Trump administration as a potential goldmine. The administration has, after all, expressed a strong interest in downsizing functions traditionally managed by the federal government and transferring them to the private sector. Within hours of entering office, Trump also began dismantling President Joe Biden’s AI-related legislative agenda, including nascent efforts to set up regulatory infrastructure—creating an opening for startups like Wang’s to move in.
Wang knows that the current administration takes a dim view on “AI safety” and has instead worked to reframe the issue as a matter of national security. He has positioned Scale as a leading authority in this space—and an ideal partner to assume these functions if they’re removed from federal oversight.
And Wang is well motivated to increase his government involvement. Scale faces new competition from other startups like Turing and Mercor that could eat away at its private sector contracts. Meanwhile Scale’s massive $107 million deal from the Defense Department, part of the Department’s multibillion-dollar AI warfare initiative Project Maven, ended in the fall after five years. The company is currently in the process of negotiating the renewal of that contract.
At the same time, Scale has attracted top investors, such as Accel and Founders Fund, and fetched steadily higher valuations—most recently $13.8 billion in a $1 billion funding round last spring.
But Scale has been dogged by allegations of labor violations over its treatment of its freelance workers—many of whom live outside of America—and last year, the Department of Labor launched an investigation into Scale over allegations of the misclassification of workers and unpaid wages. Scale lawyers were working toward a settlement with the government prior to the change of administration, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. Under Trump, the investigation seems to have stalled, part of a broader apparent push by the administration to cut down on regulations and corporate investigations.
A group of roughly 40 former Scale workers who are unhappy about the investigation languishing have launched a campaign to try to get the government to take action. Meanwhile, Scale has been sued by contractors multiple times in the past year over its alleged treatment of workers.
When Kratsios was asked during the confirmation process about Scale’s labor practices, he repeatedly said he didn’t work in the part of Scale’s business that dealt with the contract workers.
Some experts remain concerned about the risks of companies like Scale getting too involved in the government’s regulatory work. “It will exacerbate corruption,” said international AI policy analyst Ana Brandusescu, who attended the panel in Paris.
In 2020, Scale was awarded its first government contract, a $16.5 million deal to help train machine learning algorithms at the Department of Defense. The next year, the company began hiring lobbyists to push lawmakers for more AI spending in defense and intelligence-focused appropriations bills, according to congressional lobbying disclosures.
More recently, the company has turned its attention to model evaluation services, assessing the performance and safety of the industry’s top large language models. In late 2023, Scale launched its SEAL (Safety, Evaluations and Alignment Lab) research team, and later began publishing its LLM leaderboard, which ranks top AI models based on a variety of performance metrics. Since then, Scale has continued to put its stamp on projects that are shaping AI industry standards. Last year, the company collaborated with the Center for AI Safety to release the Weapons of Mass Destruction Proxy benchmark, which measures models’ hazardous knowledge in biology, chemistry and cybersecurity. In January, the two groups teamed up again to publish Humanity’s Last Exam, a set of 3,000 extremely difficult questions collected from world-class experts across a variety of scientific disciplines intended to raise the bar on AI evaluations as models get smarter.
Establishing these benchmarks—all while Wang says he believes artificial general intelligence will arrive this decade—has helped bolster Scale’s authority, possibly positioning the company to win more government contracts.
Wang’s own personal brand has also evolved to suit the changing political landscape. Last year, Scale hired Lulu Cheng Meservey, a high-profile communications consultant who has cemented her status as a go-to image maker for right-wing tech.
In June, as Trump began to pull ahead in the polls, Wang rolled out Scale’s “MEI” system—merit, excellence and intelligence—as an apparent alternative to diversity, equity and inclusion, which had become a lightning rod among Silicon Valley conservatives.
Wang’s campaigning kicked into higher gear after Trump was elected. At the inauguration in January, he sat next to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and mingled with influencers like Jake and Logan Paul. He has also grown close with political consultant Alex Bruesewitz, who has worked with Donald Trump and his family members on their media strategies. Bruesewitz accompanied Wang to a podcast recording with right-wing influencer Theo Von, who had scored an attention-grabbing interview with Trump during the presidential campaign.
The day after the inauguration, Wang published a full-page ad in the Washington Post that read, “Dear President Trump, America Must Win the AI War,” a dramatic use of language that sent ripples across the AI industry, according to several sources. He later returned to D.C. where he met with members of the Trump administration as well as Speaker Mike Johnson and Republican senators John Thune and John Barrasso.
By the time the Chinese firm DeepSeek revealed the powerful new chatbot powered by its DeepSeek-R1 model, Wang had already established himself as an early, hawkish voice warning of Chinese AI’s growing capabilities. At Davos, he warned that DeepSeek had access to at least 50,000 coveted H100 GPU chips to train its models, despite export controls intended to keep them out of their hands.
Emphasizing the threat posed by China, while warning that the U.S. government is not investing enough in AI for defense, could of course be a useful narrative for a company hoping to capture some of those federal dollars.
Scale recently beat 170 competitors to win a new contract from the Defense Department’s commercial technology wing, for a project called Thunderforge, which is reportedly a “multimillion dollar deal.” Wang has surely made clear he is eager to move ahead. As he said in an interview this fall with Scale investor Index Partners, “My concern is, we’re just not moving fast enough.”