The White House has released its ‘AI Action Plan’, which frames the coming decade as a technological race the US cannot afford to lose.
Laced with the urgent rhetoric of a new cold war, the action plan argues that securing victory in AI is nothing short of a national imperative. Trump’s foreword sets the tone, calling for America to “achieve and maintain unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance” as a core tenet of national security.
To get there, the administration is making a three-pronged push: ignite a firestorm of domestic innovation, build the colossal infrastructure to sustain it, and project American power across the globe to secure the win.
Pillar I: An action plan to support the private AI sector
At its heart, the strategy is a full-throated endorsement of the private sector. The first move is to take a buzzsaw to the regulatory frameworks of the past, with the document explicitly targeting the “onerous” approach of the previous administration.
The philosophy is simple: get out of the way and let innovators innovate. According to US Vice President JD Vance, smothering the technology with rules now would be to “paralyse one of the most promising technologies we have seen in generations.”
The plan even uses the power of federal funding as a stick, threatening to withhold money from states that dare to enact their own “burdensome AI regulations.”
It also strides confidently into the culture wars, insisting that AI systems paid for by the taxpayer must reflect “American values.” This means a preference for models that are “objective and free from top-down ideological bias” and a directive to scrub concepts like misinformation and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion from the government’s official AI risk guides.
Pillar II: A foundation of concrete and code
The second pillar of the action plan relates to the raw, physical demands of the AI revolution.
“AI is the first digital service in modern life that challenges America to build vastly greater energy generation than we have today,” the plan bluntly states. Its answer is a national mobilisation under the banner of “Build, Baby, Build!”—a vast undertaking to erect data centres, bring semiconductor manufacturing home, and construct the power grid of the future.
This means fast-tracking environmental permits and overhauling the nation’s energy supply, mixing today’s power sources with tomorrow’s bets on nuclear fusion. Bringing chipmaking back to US shores is central to this vision, with a promise to refocus the CHIPS Program Office on delivering results without ideological strings attached.
And, behind it all, a push to train a new generation of technicians and engineers to build and maintain this new industrial backbone.
Pillar III: Ensuring an undisputed lead on the world stage
The final pillar is about shaping the world in America’s image. The ambition is to make the entire US tech stack – from silicon to the software – the undisputed “gold standard for AI worldwide.” This involves an aggressive export strategy to arm allies with American technology, explicitly to counter the influence of a rising China.
This new foreign policy will involve pushing back against Chinese influence in global forums like the United Nations, which the administration believes are being used to promote innovation-killing regulations. It also signals a more hawkish approach to security, demanding tighter controls on the advanced chips that fuel AI progress.
The plan confronts the dark side of AI head-on, acknowledging its potential for misuse in everything from cybercrime to bioweapons, and calls for a national effort to get ahead of the threat.
AI Action Plan lands in a divided industry
The administration’s confident blueprint for the future lands in an industry deeply conflicted about its own creation. Just this week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warned about the technology’s disruptive power.
Altman warns that AI will not only eliminate jobs but also pose national security threats. He has spoken of a looming “fraud crisis” powered by AI’s ability to fool security systems, and has gone so far as to co-sign a letter stating that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority”.
His commentary is a stark reminder that the race for AI dominance is also a race to control a technology with world-altering potential. While Washington focuses on winning, the architects of AI are quietly wrestling with what victory might actually mean.
However, the plan received a cautious welcome from the nonprofit Americans for Responsible Innovation (ARI). The group saw its own fingerprints on several proposals, from stronger export controls to more research into AI safety.
Yet ARI is deeply troubled by the administration’s move to punish states that pursue their own AI safety rules. This position also seems at odds with the views of industry leaders like Altman, who has himself warned against the chaos of 50 different state-level regulations.
“Ultimately, this action plan is about increasing oversight of AI systems while maintaining a hands-off approach to hard and fast regulations,” said ARI President Brad Carson. He sees a chance to better understand the “big risks frontier models create for the public,” but worries about the administration’s tactics.
“The plan’s targeting of state-passed AI safeguards is cause for concern. For America to lead on AI, we have to build public trust in these systems, and safeguards are essential to that public confidence.”
(Photo by Luke Michael)
See also: Sam Altman: AI will cause job losses and national security threats
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