The AI Race Isn’t Real
As one of his first acts in office, President Trump rescinded President Biden’s executive order imposing basic safety reporting requirements on artificial intelligence (AI) companies. A few days later, Trump issued an executive order directing federal officials to change existing policies that might inhibit AI development. Six months later, the White House released its AI Action Plan, titled “Winning the Race,” that called for removing barriers to innovation, cutting “red tape,” and revising federal safety frameworks to eliminate references to climate change, misinformation, and diversity.
The notion of an AI race against China is at the center of the administration’s deregulatory turn. The AI Action Plan begins by stating: “The United States is in a race to achieve global dominance in [AI]. Whoever has the largest AI ecosystem will set global AI standards and reap broad economic and military benefits.” It sets “dominance in this global race” as its primary goal. Vice President Vance has raised concerns that, if America pauses AI development to focus on safety issues, we could “find ourselves all enslaved to P.R.C.-mediated A.I.” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth recently ordered the integration of AI into a variety of military systems, asserting that “[m]ilitary AI is going to be a race … and therefore speed wins” and stating: “We must accept that the risks of not moving fast enough outweigh the risks of imperfect alignment [between humans and AI].”
Read the full piece here.