“Breakthroughs in these fields have the potential to reshape the global balance of power, spark entirely new industries, and revolutionize the way we live and work… it is a national security imperative for the United States to achieve and maintain unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance.”
— Donald J. Trump, 45th and 47th President of the United States
On July 24, 2025, the White House unveiled America’s AI Action Plan, a bold, unapologetic roadmap to claim and secure global supremacy in artificial intelligence. Framed not as an academic strategy but as a race for technological survival and superiority, the plan cements the U.S. position: AI dominance is the new national imperative. This isn’t policy as usual, this is power politics through algorithms, compute, and code.
This Action Plan is built around three core pillars: accelerating innovation, building infrastructure, and leading global diplomacy and security. But beneath those, the White House outlines three principles that anchor the government’s entire AI posture:
1. Empowering American workers: AI must elevate American livelihoods, not displace them.
2. Ensuring AI reflects objective truth: AI systems must be free of ideological engineering and bias.
3. Securing national interests: U.S. innovation must be shielded from theft, misuse, and geopolitical exploitation.
Together, these priorities paint a picture of AI as an economic engine, a cultural force, and a weapon of influence, one that must be steered aggressively, and without interference.
Pillar I: Acceleration Over Caution
The first pillar focuses on unleashing private sector innovation by cutting bureaucratic red tape and federal regulation. President Trump’s early move to revoke Biden-era Executive Order 14110 on AI is seen here as foundational—positioning the U.S. government not as a regulator, but as a facilitator of unbound development.
Key directives include:
– Rescinding or revising federal rules that limit AI development and redirecting funding away from states with strict AI regulations.
– Promoting free-speech-aligned frontier AI models while stripping government AI standards (like NIST’s RMF) of references to misinformation, DEI, or climate change.
– Championing open-source and open-weight AI models as strategic assets for national competitiveness and global influence.
– Establishing “regulatory sandboxes” to allow rapid prototyping and deployment of AI systems in sectors like healthcare, defense, and agriculture.
– Launching national AI skill-building initiatives, tax incentives for workforce training, and a proposed AI Workforce Research Hub to monitor long-term labor impact.
This pillar is about speed and dominance, less about guardrails and more about leapfrogging competitors, particularly China.
Pillar II: Build Everything: Faster, Bigger, Secure
The second pillar recognizes that AI supremacy won’t be won through models alone. It will be won with hardware, energy, and secure systems capable of powering and protecting large-scale AI deployments.
The strategy calls for:
– Permitting reform to fast-track data center construction, chip factories, and power generation.
– Expanding America’s energy grid to match AI’s demands, prioritizing nuclear, geothermal, and other frontier technologies.
– Reviving domestic semiconductor manufacturing, removing non-essential policy constraints from CHIPS Act funds.
– Constructing high-security data centers for defense and intelligence operations.
– Training a specialized infrastructure workforce, from HVAC technicians to AI-adapted electricians.
– Securing AI systems against cyber threats, and launching an AI-specific Information Sharing and Analysis Center (AI-ISAC).
This pillar screams industrial revolution, but one hardened for war.
Pillar III: Influence Abroad, Control at Home
Perhaps the most strategic (and provocative) pillar of the plan is the third: using AI to reassert U.S. dominance in international tech governance while containing adversarial powers, primarily China.
Highlights include:
– Exporting a full AI stack—hardware, models, software, standards—to allies in exchange for alignment on values.
– Countering Chinese influence in bodies like the UN, OECD, and ITU.
– Tightening export controls on advanced chips and manufacturing subsystems.
– Evaluating foreign frontier models for censorship alignment, security vulnerabilities, and potential backdoors.
– Promoting deepfake detection tools, and issuing DOJ guidance on their admissibility in legal proceedings.
– Implementing global strategies for semiconductor control, export policy enforcement, and AI diplomacy.
The message is clear: U.S. AI must not only lead, it must shape the rules others follow.
What do we think?
There’s no doubt that America’s AI Action Plan is a defining moment in 21st-century tech policy. It’s visionary, forceful, and deeply strategic. But for all its ambition, there’s an uncomfortable vacuum where regulation, safety, and ethical AI governance should be.
While the Plan emphasizes speed, control, and global influence, it deliberately avoids implementing comprehensive regulatory guardrails for AI developers and companies, especially the large private players based in the U.S. That’s a critical gap. As the Plan itself emphasizes, AI is now essential infrastructure. And infrastructure, by nature, affects lives, rights, and futures.
If the U.S. wants to lead internationally, particularly in contrast to the European Union’s AI Act, it must reconcile power with accountability. It must demonstrate that AI can be unleashed without losing sight of transparency, fairness, and human dignity. Because if America’s AI systems become global defaults, so too will the consequences of their unchecked deployment.
The AI race is real. But without smart regulation, it risks becoming a race to the bottom.