Trump’s Position on AI Makes No Sense

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The AI panic has arrived.

Tech CEOs are practically begging the government to make them slow down.

But Donald Trump isn’t buying any of it.

On Sunday, he dismissed calls for AI regulation on the grounds that doing so would surrender America’s position in the global AI arms race.

“Look, we’re leading China in AI,” the president told reporters.

“We’re the most sophisticated country in the world.

And frankly, I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI wins.” He repeated the sentiment less decorously in a Truth Social post yesterday describing the calls for regulation as “a SICK conspiracy going on against AI,” adding that “the only one that is happy about it is China.” But if Trump is truly concerned about staying ahead of China in the AI race, he hasn’t been acting like it.

Late last year, his administration lifted export controls on advanced chips made by the American company Nvidia.

These chips are the most crucial input to AI development.

The policy is the equivalent of declaring that the United States must remain ahead of Russia in the nuclear-arms race, while allowing American firms to sell uranium to the Kremlin.

Indeed, America’s monopoly on advanced computer chips might be the biggest reason the U.S. has kept ahead of Chinese AI companies so far.

Experts generally agree that China is level with or ahead of America when it comes to engineering talent, training data, and energy supply.

But training a top AI model also requires highly advanced computer chips capable of performing trillions of calculations a second.