Most people who engage with AI do so in a fun and marginal way. But there is a very serious political side to it that the Trump administration understands.
In an attempt to actually push artificial intelligence forward, the federal government is pushing for vast energy exploration, which is a very good thing.
AI requires extraordinary energy consumption. China right now is vastly out-producing us on an energy level. They have no environmental regulations, so they’re ramming through huge energy projects that are designed in order to foster their AI system.
The United States, under President Trump, is opening up the energy sector, which is absolutely necessary. The United States is also deregulating a lot of the tech economy, which is excellent. It means that there will be more capital that flows into the AI race, and that matters for both reasons, military and technological.
American companies are still leading this race. Yesterday, ChatGPT released GPT-5, which is their new flagship AI model. “OpenAI executives called GPT-5 a “major upgrade” over the systems that previously powered ChatGPT, saying the new technology was faster, more accurate and less likely to ‘hallucinate,’ or make stuff up,” The New York Times reported. “OpenAI has consistently improved the technology that underpins its chatbot. … OpenAI’s many rivals, including Google, Meta, the start-up Anthropic and China’s DeepSeek, have released similar technologies. This is the first time that OpenAI has used a so-called reasoning model to power the free version of ChatGPT. Unlike the previous technologies, a reasoning model can spend time ‘thinking’ through complex problems before settling on an answer.”
So, instead of AI being a predictive text mechanism, it basically checks its own work to prevent errors. All of this is indeed transformative, and the U.S. federal workforce is apparently going to be provided access to ChatGPT at essentially no cost. It’s going to filter through to the federal workforce, which is good.
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But this does raise the question of what we do with China, because it is a race between the United States and China.
There is some conflicting thinking among people on the Right about what to do with China. Some believe that China should be provided access to everything except the H100 from Nvidia, because if we get China dependent on American silicon, they will have to build on our platforms, and that’s better than them developing their own industry in microchips domestically.
And then there is the side which I tend toward, which is: No, don’t give China anything. Make them steal it.
The Trump administration seems rather split on this; you’ll see the Trump administration say China is cheating. President Trump even went after the Intel CEO for having too many close ties to China. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas had called them out, pointing out that the deep relationship meant that Intel chips were probably getting into China illegally. Cotton wrote an open letter to Intel’s board with questions about the chipmaker’s new CEO Lip-Bu Tan’s ties to Chinese firms.
I agree with that.
On the other hand, the administration is also opening up the possibility of Nvidia shipping H20s to the Chinese government.
So, a policy must be settled on with regard to how to view China and developments in AI. Are we going to be in an open competition with China? Is it going to be a “frenemy” situation with China?
That remains utterly unclear.
The answer may well determine the future of the United States.
