The AI Grand Bargain: What America Needs to Win the Innovation Race

[SS from essay by Ben Buchanan, the Dmitri Alperovitch Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. From 2021 to 2025, he served in a variety of roles in the White House, including as Special Adviser for Artificial Intelligence; Tantum Collins, Director for Technology and National Security on the National Security Council from 2023 to 2025.]

The United States’ lead in artificial intelligence might seem unassailable. U.S. companies—Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI—are out in front across almost all assessments of the technology’s general capabilities. American AI models are outperforming doctorate-level scientists on challenging questions in physics, chemistry, and biology. Just a few American AI and chip giants are worth more than the entire Chinese stock market, and investors from across the world are plowing ever more resources into the American AI ecosystem.

This breakneck progress is, in many ways, a testament to the strengths of the model of American AI development that has dominated for the last decade: letting the private sector operate on its own, with remarkably little direct government meddling or resourcing. This approach is quite different from those that ushered in past breakthrough technologies. Nuclear weapons and power, space travel, stealth systems, personal computing, and the Internet emerged either directly from U.S. government efforts or on the back of significant public funding. AI also has roots in government-funded science, including in personal computing and the Internet, and it benefits from ongoing government-supported research. But scaling up AI has been essentially a private-sector activity.