America Won't Win the AI Race by Handcuffing Itself
For most of American history, technological leadership has been driven by confidence rather than fear. This is a lesson U.S. President Donald Trump understands well, and it's clearly reflected in his approach to Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Yet today, a loud faction of the American tech world is pushing the country in the opposite direction. Under the banner of "AI safety," a group of AI "doomers" argue that the United States must slow down and tightly control the spread of advanced AI technology.
At the forefront of this movement is Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, who has been among the most vocal critics of President Trump's AI policies, particularly his recalibration of AI chip export controls.
Amodei has gone so far as to liken recent White House-approved sales of AI processors to foreign markets to "selling nuclear weapons to North Korea."
It's a striking analogy, and an unserious one.
Chips are not bombs.
They are tools of economic scale, standard-setting, and technological influence.
Characterizing them in such apocalyptic terms misunderstands both how innovation spreads and how global power is exercised in the modern economy.
Dig a little deeper, however, and it becomes clear that such "doomerism" is not driven purely by fear of artificial intelligence itself.
It's shaped by politics and by rent-seeking incentives that benefit a narrow set of firms while harming broader American interests.
Anthropic is not a politically neutral actor.
David Sacks, now serving as President Trump's AI and crypto czar, has been explicit about this dynamic.
Sacks has criticized Anthropic and similar firms for embedding ideological assumptions into AI governance debates and pushing "woke" regulatory frameworks that conveniently align with their own commercial interests.
The Department of War is even reportedly "close" to cutting ties with the company and designating it a supply chain risk due to months of contentious negotiations over the terms under which the military can use Claude (Anthropic's AI).
The company has also staffed itself with former Biden administration officials.
Is it possible, they may be hostile to President Trump's economic and national security agenda by default.
This matters.
The regulatory frameworks Anthropic advocates would place extraordinary power in the hands of a small, aligned elite, while sidelining market competition and democratic oversight.
The financial incentives behind extreme export restrictions are not complicated.
Limiting foreign access to American AI chips reduces global demand and dampens competition from international buyers.
In the short term, that can make scarce hardware more available and potentially cheaper for a handful of large domestic AI firms.
But what looks like a benefit to those firms is a serious liability for American chipmakers, whose business model depends on global scale, high-volume sales, and reinvestment into next-generation manufacturing.
This is not a hypothetical concern.
The Biden administration attempted a far more aggressive version of this strategy, imposing sweeping export restrictions designed to choke off China's access to advanced chips and computing infrastructure.
The theory was that starving Beijing of hardware would freeze its AI development and preserve American dominance, but in practice the opposite dynamic began to emerge.
China responded by pouring enormous resources into domestic chip alternatives, accelerating precisely the kind of technological decoupling that weakens American leverage.
Now America is at a critical inflection point in the race for AI dominance.
This is why President Trump's strategic reset on AI chip exports matters so much.
Rather than attempting to wall off global markets entirely, Trump has adopted a calibrated approach.
The administration continues to restrict the most advanced, sensitive hardware, while allowing American companies to sell high-performance chips to vetted commercial customers abroad.
This strategy does several things at once:
—It keeps U.S. companies embedded in the world’s fastest-growing AI markets.
—It sustains the revenue base that funds American innovation and domestic manufacturing.
—It ensures that global AI infrastructure remains built on American chips, software, and standards.
Of equal importance, it reintroduces competitive pressure into markets that would otherwise drift toward closed, state-controlled alternatives.
Chinese firms that rely on U.S. chips remain constrained by U.S. platforms.
They remain interoperable with American systems.
And they remain vulnerable to future leverage if national security conditions change.
AI leadership is not secured by retreat.
The "doomer" vision offered by Amodei and his ilk would return America to the failed assumptions of the Biden years.
It would shrink markets, slow innovation, entrench incumbents, and accelerate the rise of foreign alternatives. It would make American firms smaller, not safer, and American influence weaker, not stronger.
President Trump's approach is rooted in confidence rather than panic.
It assumes that America can compete and win without apologizing for its success.
It balances free markets with selective, strategic protectionism that serves national security without smothering capitalism.
That's how America has always led.
And in the race for AI dominance, it is the only path that makes sense.
Julio Rivera is a business and political strategist, cybersecurity researcher, founder of ItFunk.Org, and a political commentator and columnist. His writing, which is focused on cybersecurity and politics, is regularly published by many of the largest news organizations in the world. Read more Julio Rivera Insider articles — Click Here Now.
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