How President Trump’s AI action plan can position America for success

The Trump administration is prioritizing the critical role of artificial intelligence in creating and upholding freedom. Just three weeks in, Vice President JD Vance declared at a global AI summit in Paris that AI “will make people more productive, more prosperous, and more free. The United States of America is the leader in AI, and our administration plans to keep it that way.”

To achieve this, the White House is working toward an AI action plan and calling on leading American AI companies to submit our best ideas. OpenAI is pleased to submit proposals today on a range of important considerations for AI from national security, to infrastructure and energy, to the federal government’s own use of AI.

Human history is the history of human innovation of technologies that create and scale new freedoms. From daylight to firelight to lamplight, to electricity providing light and power at all hours – we scaled the freedom to produce, think and create. From word of mouth to the stylus and tablet, to the printing press, telegraph, phone, computer, smartphone – we scaled freedom of learning and knowledge. 

Now, with AI, innovation is poised to scale human ingenuity itself – the sum of our freedoms to learn and know, think, create and produce. As OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman has written, we are at the doorstep of the next leap in prosperity, the Intelligence Age. But we must ensure that people have freedom of intelligence, by which we mean the freedom to access and benefit from AI as it advances, protected from both autocratic powers that would take people’s freedoms away, and layers of laws and bureaucracy that would prevent our realizing them. 

AI IS ALL BRAIN AND NO ETHICS

More than 400 million people around the world are using ChatGPT, powered by OpenAI’s most advanced research, to ideate, discover and break through beyond what we’re currently capable of doing on our own. 

Globally, the vast majority of these users are young; in the U.S., one-third of our users self-report to being between ages 18 to 24. Both young people and their parents see the economic opportunities AI can create, and the Trump administration’s AI policies can make these opportunities reality:

• At a time when more than seven in 10 parents in the U.S. believe kids today will be worse off financially than they are, nine in 10 think it’s important that their kids learn how to use AI for their future jobs – and eight in 10 say either that isn’t happening today, or they don’t know if it is.
• Three in four college-aged AI users want to use AI in their education and careers. Many are teaching themselves and their friends about AI for lack of their schools providing formal AI education.

AI CAN’T WAIT: WHY WE NEED SPEED TO WIN

In recent weeks, OpenAI has struck partnerships with a dozen U.S. universities, including one with the California State University system, to put ChatGPT in the hands of its 500,000 students and educators across its 23 campuses. With the help of forward-thinking school systems, the scaling of human ingenuity can happen not just one young person at a time, but tens of thousands of young people at a time.

Provided, that is, that we continue to ensure that people have the freedom to access and benefit from AI – which is no longer as certain as it once was, now that America is competing with a People’s Republic of China (PRC) determined to overtake us as the global leader on AI by 2030. 

The PRC has a number of strategic advantages, including:

As an authoritarian state, its ability to quickly marshal resources – data, energy, technical talent and the enormous sums needed to build out its own domestic chip development capacity. 

AI IS RESHAPING BUSINESS. THIS IS HOW WE STAY AHEAD OF CHINA

Its preexisting Belt and Road initiative. As with Huawei, the PRC will scale the adoption of PRC-based AI systems like DeepSeek’s by coercing countries needing AI tools and nation-building infrastructure funds.  

Its ability to benefit from regulatory arbitrage being created by individual American states seeking to pass their own industry-wide laws, some of which are modeled on the European Union’s regulation of AI. These laws are easier to enforce upon domestic AI companies than PRC-based companies and could impose burdensome compliance requirements that undermine our economic competitiveness and our national security. They also may weaken the quality and kinds of training data available to American entrepreneurs. 

Its ability to benefit from copyright arbitrage being created by democratic nations that don’t clearly protect AI training by statute, like the U.S., or that reduce the amount of training data through an opt-out regime for copyright holders, like the EU. The PRC is unlikely to respect the IP regimes of any such nations for the training of its AI systems, but likely already has access to all the same data, putting American AI labs at a disadvantage and offering little protection for the original IP creators.

AI SHOULDN’T DECIDE WHO DIES. IT’S NEITHER HUMAN NOR HUMANE

This is why OpenAI welcomes the chance to submit policy proposals to a Trump administration that’s moving fast to secure our nation’s lead on AI and in so doing, help secure a more prosperous future for all Americans and especially young Americans. They include:

A regulatory strategy that ensures the freedom to innovate: For innovation to truly create new freedoms, America’s builders, developers and entrepreneurs – our nation’s greatest competitive advantage – must first have the freedom to innovate in the national interest. We propose a holistic approach that enables voluntary partnership between the federal government and the private sector, and neutralizes potential PRC benefit from American AI companies having to comply with overly burdensome state laws.

A copyright strategy that promotes the freedom to learn: America’s robust, balanced intellectual property system has long been key to our global leadership on innovation. We propose a copyright strategy that would extend the system’s role into the Intelligence Age by protecting the rights and interests of content creators while also protecting America’s AI leadership and national security. The U.S. government can secure Americans’ freedom to learn from AI, and avoid forfeiting our lead to the PRC, by preserving American AI models’ ability to learn from copyrighted material.

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An ambitious government adoption strategy: Advancing democratic AI around the world starts with ensuring that the U.S. government itself sets an example of governments using AI to keep their people safe, prosperous and free. With the PRC progressing toward ambitious targets for AI adoption across its public administration, security and military, the U.S. government should modernize its processes to safely deploy frontier AI tools at the pace of the private sector and with the efficiency Americans deserve. 

OpenAI believes in America because America believes in innovation. This country always succeeds and prevails when it bets on the ingenuity of its people, and putting AI in the hands of our young people is the best possible way to scale their ingenuity.

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