Congress Shouldn’t Undermine Trump’s AI Agenda

President Donald Trump has made clear that the United States intends to win the global artificial intelligence race.

From expanding domestic energy production to supporting new data centers and encouraging advanced manufacturing, the administration has recognized that AI leadership will be one of the defining economic and national security priorities of the 21st century. That strategy extends beyond America’s borders as well. 

The administration’s new Pax Silica agreement seeks to strengthen cooperation among trusted partners on artificial intelligence, advanced computing, and critical technology supply chains. Its goal is to ensure that the future of AI is built on American innovation and shared with allies rather than dominated by China. It already has 24 signatories, including the U.S. and the European Union.

Getting allied nations on one page when it comes to AI is exactly the right objective. But diplomacy alone will not determine who wins the AI race. Adoption will.

And on that front, an obstacle lies ahead. It involves one of the nations very much not on the Pax Silica list: China.

China is investing enormous resources into becoming the world’s leading AI power. Its companies are improving rapidly, and the competition is becoming more intense every year.

While America is still the global leader in AI, Chinese tech is closing the gap. 

Just last month, a Chinese start-up called Z.ai released an AI model that’s nearly as powerful as leading U.S. developer Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos. Z.ai’s big day felt like a rerun of 2024, when the Chinese company DeepSeek stunned observers by releasing its own cost-effective AI model.

It’s not just that China’s AI is leapfrogging forward. It’s that too often U.S. economic policy hamstrings American products, a self-own that ultimately benefits Beijing.

The U.S. is considering overzealous export controls on its own tech. Take, for example, the House of Representatives’ version of the Remote Access Security Act. If passed, this version of the bill would let the government prohibit U.S. providers from offering cloud computing services—even services disconnected from national security—not just to China but also to many allied nations that don’t comply with a laundry list of new regulations. Such a blanket approach risks shrinking the global reach of American technology—the opposite of what America should want as it competes with China.

As Oren Etzioni, an AI expert and professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Washington, put it, “If RASA passes, customers in other nations who currently patronize the U.S. may instead begin patronizing China. Again, the U.S. economy would lose money, and America would lose technological and political influence in what is likely the most important contest of the 21st century.”

Congress needs to stop ignoring the Trump administration’s insistence that the AI race is really one of global adoption. 

The administration is correct: The future of the global economy will be determined by which nations’ AI ends up powering the world—America’s or China’s.

If legitimate customers abroad conclude that American AI has become too complicated or uncertain to access, they will not abandon artificial intelligence altogether; they will look elsewhere.

Congress should start weighing every new AI law and trade measure not just on national security grounds but on whether it helps reach the goal of being the global AI leader. Otherwise, America can kiss its tech advantage goodbye—not because we couldn’t innovate but because we couldn’t get our innovations to everyone else.

As America’s recent 250th birthday reminded us, the U.S. is the land of the free. We know better than to suffocate our innovators in red tape.

The Pax Silica seeks “an economic security order based on trust, technological complementarity, shared interests, and a shared commitment to a more prosperous future.” 

We can’t have that trust, that shared commitment, if we try to cut off our partners and friends. A future that runs on American tech will be good for the globe and good for us too. 

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