The Trump administration’s plan makes great strides in domestic AI investment. We must go further to mitigate risks and protect Americans
Today, the Trump administration released its AI Action Plan to lay a foundation for its efforts to maintain America’s dominance in AI development on the world stage. The plan touts welcome efforts to invest in American AI infrastructure and spur innovation domestically, but it could do more to protect the American people from AI’s potential harmful impacts on the country’s national security, economy, and civil liberties.
Brendan Steinhauser, CEO of The Alliance for Secure AI, released the following statement:
“The Alliance for Secure AI is pleased that the Trump administration is taking the issue of AI security head-on as it continues to transform our world in profound ways.
We commend its vision to invest in AI infrastructure and strengthen our energy grid to power the development needed to ensure America remains the dominant leader in AI.
We encourage the administration to enact more safeguards to secure American chips, mitigate advanced AI’s potential dangers, and boost – not hinder – states’ ability to protect their citizens from the potential harms of AI. The actions our leaders take now will reverberate for decades to come, and an America First agenda includes making AI security a top priority.”
The Alliance applauds the AI Action Plan’s provisions that refer to increasing investments in interpretability, onshoring semiconductor manufacturing, hardening our critical infrastructure, and enhancing our defenses against cyber attacks. The plan’s provisions to invest in domestic AI data centers and bolster the country’s energy infrastructure will go a long way to guarantee America’s AI dominance in the long-term, but there are gaps the administration must address to ensure that advanced AI systems are safe and secure:
- Release a sensible export control plan that guarantees U.S. chips remain in the hands of democratic trading partners, and cannot be accessed by our adversaries through smuggling or backchannels – This also means that the administration must roll back deals like the one with Nvidia allowing the company to ship H20 chips to China;
- Allow states to freely enact AI policy to protect their citizens, without the threat of having federal funding withheld from their states;
- There must be rigorous debate about how to strengthen America’s workforce as major CEOs repeatedly issue warnings that millions of Americans will lose their jobs as AI technology advances;
- The administration should encourage Big Tech companies and frontier labs to be increasingly transparent about the systems that they are building and create evolving, accessible, and publicly available safety standards as AI becomes more advanced.
Earlier this month, The Alliance for Secure AI launched an open letter and petition to President Trump, Vice President Vance, and leaders in Congress, to encourage them to take action to address AI’s potential risks to America’s national security and its labor force. The petition, which is still ongoing, amassed over 10,000 signatures by the release of the AI Action Plan.
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