In our scramble to win the AI race against China, we risk losing ourselves

A fraud is being perpetuated on the American people and our pliant, gullible political leaders. The leaders of the artificial intelligence industry in the United States - brimming with dangerous hubris, rapacious in their desire to build wealth and power, and comfortable knowingly putting aside the destructive power of their product - claim that any meaningful regulation of AI in America will allow China to leapfrog the United States in the global competition to control the world’s AI infrastructure. But they are dead wrong. In fact, the opposite is true. If America does not protect its economy and culture from the potential ravages of advanced AI, our nation will rot from the inside out, giving China a free lane to pass us politically and economically.

Yes, AI is a transformational technology. It will likely turn out to be the most socially and economically disruptive technology ever - bigger than the printing press or advanced medicine or the internet. And there is no doubt it will come with huge practical upside for our nation: medical advances will come more quickly, production will be cheaper, complex societal problems will be solved more easily.

AI industry leaders assert that losing the race to control the global AI market to China would be an existential threat to our safety, an argument that feels correct on its face. Of course America should want the jobs and the political power that would come by dominating the AI market. And of course we want American, not Chinese, standards to be applied to AI as it becomes mainstreamed with consumers and businesses.

But if the American AI industry gets its way, it’s likely that neither of those things will happen. First, once AI can reason more effectively than a human (called Artificial General Intelligence or “AGI”), AI will undoubtedly be a net job killer, not a job creator. Once a machine can problem solve better than a human - in addition to writing, creating, coding, and driving better than humans - the job displacement will be massive and devastating. That’s just common sense. And there will never be enough new jobs to keep up. The CEO of Anthropic, one of the biggest companies in the industry, recently estimated that AGI would wipe out half of all white collar entry level jobs, spiking unemployment by 10-20% within the next decade. American society would likely implode if unemployment reached sustained levels above 20%.

Sure, AGI will also create jobs. If America is where the industry flourishes, there will be jobs involved in the development and maintenance of these new supercomputers. And the vexing problems that AGI solves may require humans to carry out the solutions. But we’ve seen this playbook before. The AI industry leaders who claim that there will be net job gains in the U.S. are pulling the same trick that the outsourcing corporations pulled on us in the 1980s when they promised better jobs would replace all the manufacturing jobs that were leaving for Mexico and China.

Not enough jobs will be created to replace the jobs we lose, and even the new jobs likely won’t stay in the United States due to the industry’s insatiable desire to maximize profits. A year ago, OpenAI’s Sam Altman sat in my office pitching a new (at the time) idea: outsource the power supply and data housing necessary for AGI to the repressive but wealthy regimes in the Middle East. Trump is now implementing that plan - evidence that the industry doesn’t really care about creating U.S.-based infrastructure or jobs. They are hunting profits, and to boost return on investment, without any guardrails imposed on them by government, they will use the same labor arbitrage techniques that other industries utilize and ship as many AI jobs as they can to countries with lower labor costs.

As for the argument that we need minimal or no regulation of U.S. AI because it’s better for consumers if AI breakthroughs happen here, rather than in China, there’s no evidence that this is true. But when I was in Silicon Valley this winter, I could divine very few “American values” (juxtaposed against “Chinese values”) that are guiding the development and deployment of AGI in the United States. The only value that guides the AI industry right now is the pursuit of profit. In all my meetings, it was crystal clear that companies like Google and Apple and OpenAI and Anthropic are in a race to deploy consumer-facing, job-killing AGI as quickly as possible, in order to beat each other to the market. Any talk about ethical or moral AI is just whitewash.

They are in such a hurry that they can’t even explain how the large language models they are marketing come to conclusions or synthesize data. Every single executive I met with admitted that they had built a machine that they could not understand or control. One conversational AI program, affiliated with Google, recently began recommending to kids that were frustrated with their parents that they murder their mother and father. The industry argues that there is no need for regulation and guardrails because they will regulate themselves. This is simply not true. They are in a race to deploy and commercialize and profit, and they are paying mere lip service to the ways that AGI could destroy the already fraying fabric of our nation.

And let’s not sugarcoat this - the risks to America posed by an AI dominance with no protections or limits are downright dystopian. The job loss alone - in part because it will happen so fast and without opportunity for the public sector to mitigate - could collapse our society. But because the technology has advanced so rapidly, we have not even had time to fully consider all the other ways AI could destroy us. And the list is frighteningly long.

Fake video and audio, without accountability or legal liability, could obliterate any notion of objective truth. The social isolation crisis that already exists, especially for American teens, could be set on fire by AI chatbots and friendship programs (watch Mark Zuckerberg’s recent interview to witness how excited the industry is to replace human friends with robot friends). The substitution of essential human functions - like composition and creativity and conversation - by machines will likely lead to incalculable spiritual atrophy. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Of course, AI will change our lives in positive ways; I’m no Luddite. Lives will be longer, food will become less scarce, many breakthrough inventions will come faster. But part of America’s genius, especially in the last one hundred years, is our ability to see new emerging transformational technologies, and decide early to regulate and control them in a way that allows for and efficiently delivers the positive benefits, and protects Americans, as much as possible, from the rougher edges. We did this with the railroads, with advanced medicine, and with nuclear technology. We can do it with AI.

Finally, let’s confront the AI industry’s argument that while regulation is necessary, we shouldn’t do too much of it because it will constrain us in the race with the Chinese. This argument assumes, wrongly, that the Chinese will put no constraints on the development and dissemination of their own AI models. We know this isn’t true because as we speak, China is being relatively careful with how it develops and rolls out AI. From 2021 to 2023, China began to build out a governance framework with some of the world’s earliest AI regulations and technical standards, bringing service providers into compliance on issues from ethics, data protection, safety, and security. China’s attempts at regulation have been lighter and more targeted than the EU’s, but its governance framework puts constraints on AI developers - including reporting on how algorithms are trained and required security self-assessments. That China has been actively building towards a national AI law, while producing a cutting-edge model like DeepSeek’s, makes clear that AI regulation and innovation can, and do, co-exist.

A few years ago, the AI industry made a big public spectacle of coming to Washington to show their support for regulation. But when it came down to it, they refused to engage in specifics. They endorsed or formulated no concrete proposal. I thought at the time that was suspicious and telling. And once Trump came into office, we all discovered my suspicion was warranted. Gifted with a pliant White House, the industry made their real request: no AI regulation. They pushed for and secured a provision in the giant Republican budget bill that bans all AI regulation at the state level, knowing that federal regulation is normally inspired by state models that provide both a practical and political impetus for the federal government to step into the fray. Stopping state regulation makes it a whole lot easier for the industry to slow or stop federal regulation entirely.

I want to beat China in the race for advanced AI. I do. But not at any cost. If we do not use government policy and intervention to control for the job loss and to protect consumers, it won’t matter that we get to AGI before China. Unbounded, AGI could eliminate so many jobs and undermine so many of our values, that China will cheer our decision to rush to AGI in our blind, feverish desire to be first. Ultimately, China could end up winning the race, because we destroy ourselves along the race route.