Dominance, Values and Innovation: Trump's Plan to Win the AI Race

Having issued nine executive orders on AI since assuming office, Donald Trump has redrawn the contours of US AI policy in 2025. Naming Biden-era policies as dangerous to US national interest, Trump has sought to deregulate AI for the purposes of encouraging innovation. The emphasis is to develop AI which is “consistent with American values and interests” and embed these shared values into emerging global AI governance architectures.

AI policy in the United States has taken new and amusing directions since the commencement of Donald J. Trump’s presidency in January 2025. Through a slew of executive orders and congressional interventions, the administration has sought to systematically revamp US approach to AI governance. The administration has concertedly reversed Biden-era AI policies which it sees as eroding US lead in AI. While watering down regulatory oversight on AI development and deployment, the focus has now shifted from risk mitigation to ensuring AI does not absorb dangerous ideologies that propagate engineered social agendas. This re-shifting of gears has fundamentally reframed the values, goals and priorities that guide how America innovates and adopts AI in critical sectors.

New Direction: In nine months, Trump has fundamentally shifted US approach to AI governance

In broad terms, the Trump administration’s evolving approach to AI governance views loose regulation as pivotal to boosting innovation and “winning the AI race” as Washington’s July 2025 AI Action Plan is titled. The United States shall do so through achieving “AI dominance”, much like its space race rhetoric on “space dominance”. This grand plan is to be achieved through interventions both at domestic and international levels. The perception that a lead in AI is fundamentally tied to continued American pre-eminence in international affairs is increasingly evident in the Trump administration’s AI policy.

Key Priorities: Deregulation, Streamlining and Export Control

Streamlining AI governance and strengthening AI infrastructure including energy supply and compute capacity is a central policy pursuit on the domestic front. To avoid regulatory barriers impeding innovation, the administration is seeking to manage a patchwork domestic AI governance regime consisting of various legislations enacted by states. Meanwhile, plugging the loopholes and strengthening the implementation of export controls on advanced AI compute and semiconductor manufacturing sectors constitutes another component of America’s plan to globally lead the AI race.

The AI Action Plan calls for creative methods of export control to ensure that US adversaries are denied access to the building blocks of AI. At the same time, the Action Plan stresses the importance of global distribution and diffusion of full US-made AI-technology stack to allies. This is seen as an important means of preventing allies growing dependent on technology owned by strategic rivals. This reflects the American understanding of AI as increasingly critical to national power and security. AI is seen as something its government machinery should at all costs prevent from leaking to a growing clique of adversaries.

Addressing Risk

While mentions of risk seem taboo within the evolving policy parlance, risk framed as a matrix of vulnerabilities is something that US AI strategy is increasingly seeking to address. At the strategic level, the US diplomatic machinery is tasked with reducing any threat to American interests by countering Chinese influence in international technology governance forums, including the United Nations and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The US also seeks a leading role in assessing risks emanating from frontier AI models, particularly in how it can enhance threats from Weapons of Mass Destruction. The Action Plan also cites biosecurity as an area in which threats can multiply and identifies the same as a capability to be invested in.

Protecting “American Values”

AI safety and security is an area the Trump administration is seeking to rigorously address. The passing of the Take It Down Act, which seeks to ban nonconsensual publication of sexual deepfakes online, is one instance in which the bipartisan support for countering AI-enabled abuse was made clear. Meanwhile, federal agencies have also started scrutinizing generative AI chatbots for negative impacts on youngsters’ mental health. Herein, various arms of the US AI governance regime are seeking to address vulnerabilities at the state, community and individual levels.

In this regard, values are a central point around which the discourse on AI policy is evolving in the USA. “American values”, is an expression that has become commonplace in AI regulation. Freedom of speech, anti-authoritarianism and prevention of bias as it pertains to propagating (select) ideologies as mainstream, can all be identified as constituting American values.

For instance, the executive order on preventing “Woke AI”, named Diversity, Equity Inclusivity (DEI) as an ideological agenda which posed “an existential threat to reliable AI”. The emphasis is to build AI which is “consistent with American values and interests”. Moreover, the USA plans to counter authoritarian influence through working with allies to embed these shared values into emerging global AI governance architectures.

AI Dominance: To What End?

Set on a path to achieve AI dominance, Trump’s AI policy is unique for how clearly it has communicated the parameters that define its approach to governing AI. Through clearly articulating the ethics and priorities in the AI era, the US government is looking to synergize AI policy at sectoral levels to comprehensively harness AI to project power. However, the dominance rhetoric along with unpredictable measures in the trade arena may very well serve to undermine US interests in the slightly longer run.

Already, close US allies in Europe and the Indo-Pacific have been irked with unpredictable policies that defy traditional US foreign policy prescripts. US strategic partners are moving closer towards Russia, China and India who have been propagating a collaborative narrative on leveraging AI to address global challenges and attain equitable development. Meanwhile, domestic constituencies stand disillusioned at how the White House sought to recently ban states from legislating on AI. The contours of the policy are essentially evolving in a contested and constantly transitioning geopolitical and cultural context. Its unquestionable impact on the landscape of AI diplomacy and global governance, however, might be key to deciding the impending power transition that the world may witness in this century.

Disclaimer: The article expresses the author’s views on the matter and do not reflect the opinions and beliefs of any institution they belong to or of Trivium Think Tank and the StraTechos website.

Anupama Vijayakumar is the Director (Research) of Trivium Think Tank, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India. She is also the Editor of the StraTechos website.