WASHINGTON — President Trump revealed an “action plan” for artificial intelligence on Wednesday ostensibly designed to bolster the United States in its race against China for AI superiority.

But experts in the field warn the administration is sidestepping safety precautions that sustain public trust, and is ignoring the impacts of research funding cuts and visa restrictions for scientists that could hold America back.

‘Dangerous incentives to cut corners’

Trump introduced the new policy with an address in Washington, a new government website and a slew of executive actions, easing restrictions on the export of AI technology overseas and greasing the wheels for infrastructural expansion that would accommodate the computing power required for an AI future — both top requests of American AI companies.

The plan also calls for AI to be integrated more thoroughly across the federal government, including at the Pentagon, and includes a directive targeting “woke” bias in large language models.

The new website, ai.gov, says the United States “is in a race to achieve global dominance in artificial intelligence,” and lays out three pillars of its plan for success: “Accelerating Innovation, Building AI Infrastructure, and Leading International Diplomacy and Security.”

Scholars of machine learning and AI believe that whichever country loses the race — toward general artificial intelligence, where AI has capabilities similar to the human mind, and ultimately toward superintelligence, where its abilities exceed human thought — will be unable to catch up with the exponential growth of the winner.

Today, China and the United States are the only powers with competitive AI capabilities.

“Whether we like it or not, we’re suddenly engaged in a fast-paced competition to build and define this groundbreaking technology that will determine so much about the future of civilization itself, because of the genius and creativity of Silicon Valley — and it is incredible, incredible genius, without question, the most brilliant place on Earth,” Trump said on Wednesday in his policy speech on AI.

“America is the country that started the AI race. And as president of the United States, I’m here today to declare that America is going to win it,” he added. “We’re going to work hard — we’re going to win it. Because we will not allow any foreign nation to beat us. Our children will not live in a planet controlled by the algorithms of the adversary’s advancing values.”

Yoshua Bengio, founder of Mila-Quebec AI Institute and a winner of the Turing Award for his work on deep learning, told The Times that the urgency of the race is fueling concerning behavior from both sides.

“These technologies hold enormous economic potential,” Bengio said, “but intense competition between countries or companies can create dangerous incentives to cut corners on safety in order to stay ahead.”

‘Self-inflicted ignorance’

Silicon Valley may be getting much of what it wants from Trump — but the administration’s continued assault on the student visa program remains a significant concern for the very same tech firms Trump aims to empower.

Yolanda Gil, senior director of AI and data science initiatives at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, said that the Trump administration’s reductions in funding and visas “will reduce U.S. competitiveness in AI and all technology areas, not just in the near future but for many years to come,” noting that almost 500,000 international students in science and engineering are currently enrolled in U.S. universities.

The majority of America’s top AI companies have been founded by first- or second-generation immigrants, and 70% of full-time graduate students at U.S. institutions working in AI-related fields have come from abroad. Yet the administration’s revocation and crackdown on F-1 visas risks crippling the talent pipeline the industry views as essential to success against China.

Funding cuts to research institutions, too, threaten the stability of programs and their attractiveness to the best foreign minds, said Sheila Jasanoff, a professor of science and technology studies at the Harvard Kennedy School.

“Our openness to ideas and people, combined with steadiness of funding, drew bright talents from around the globe and science prospered,” Jasanoff said. “That achievement is in a precarious state through the Trump administration’s unpredictable and exclusionary policies that have created an atmosphere in which young scientists are much less comfortable coming to do their science in America.”

“Why would a talented young person wish to invest in a U.S. graduate program if there is a risk their visa could be canceled overnight on poorly articulated and unprecedented grounds? It’s clear that other countries, including China, are already trying to benefit from our suddenly uncertain and chaotic research environment,” she added. “We seem to be heading into an era of self-inflicted ignorance.”

Teddy Svoronos, also at Harvard as a senior lecturer in public policy, said that the president is deregulating the AI industry “while limiting its ability to recruit the highest-quality talent from around the world and de-incentivizing research that lacks immediate commercial use.”

“His policies thus far convince me that the future of the U.S. will certainly have more AI,” Svoronos said, “but I don’t see a coherent strategy around creating more effective or more aligned AI.”

Safety fears

Aligned AI, in simple terms, refers to artificial intelligence that is trained to do good and avoid harm. Trump’s action plan doesn’t include the phrase, but repeatedly emphasizes the need to align AI development with U.S. interests.

The deregulatory spirit of Trump’s plan could help expedite AI development. But it could also backfire in unexpected ways, Jasanoff said.

“It’s not clear that technology development prospers without guardrails that protect scientists and engineers against accidents, overreach and public backlash,” she added. “The U.S. biotech industry, for example, has actively sought out ethical and policy clarification because missteps could endanger entire lines of research.”

The plan also has the United States encouraging the development of open-source and open-weight AI models, allowing public access to code and training data. It is a decision that will allow AI to be more readily adopted throughout the U.S. economy — but also grants malicious actors, such as terrorist organizations, access to AI tools they could use to threaten national security and global peace.

It is the sort of compromise that Bengio feared would emerge from the U.S.-China race.

“This dynamic poses serious public safety and national security risks, including AI-enabled cyberattacks, biological threats and the possibility of losing human control over advanced AI — outcomes with no winners,” Bengio said.

“To realize the full benefits of these technologies,” he added, “safety and innovation must go hand in hand, supported by strong technical and societal safeguards.”

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More to come,
Michael Wilner
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