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The United States is in an arms race against China. But this time, artificial intelligence, and not just nuclear weapons, might be the determining factor. At stake? Nothing less than freedom itself.
China, the largest police state known to man, has prioritized winning the AI arms race. If Beijing achieves its objective, it will have the potential to achieve its foremost goal: supplanting the U.S. as the global superpower.
Fortunately, America has a built-in advantage. The U.S. remains the world leader in innovation, capable of challenging convention and orthodoxy and thinking anew.
By contrast, Communist China is a closed society. Societies that don’t tolerate dissent or free thinking start with an immediate disadvantage in the realms of innovation and technology. But China does have something that America has heretofore lacked. China’s economic and political system might hinder its innovative capacity, but it does make it easier to plan ahead.
China has long had a coherent national strategy for AI. For many years, the U.S. did not. Indeed, the Biden administration’s approach to AI was, at best, passive. At worst, it was overly regulatory, taking the legs out from America’s innate strength. China took notice.
In 2021, Chinese President Xi Jinping declared, “Technological innovation has become the main battleground of the global playing field, and competition for tech dominance will grow unprecedentedly fierce.” The CCP put its money where its mouth is, focusing on the budding competition, leading to a 2021 Harvard University report warning that, in tech, China “will overtake the U.S. in the next decade.” The first chief software officer for the U.S. Air Force, Nicolas Chailan, even publicly resigned and declared that the U.S. had already lost the AI race to China. Beijing, Chailan lamented, had already won the battle.
For their part, many in Silicon Valley expressed frustration with both the direction of and the seeming lack of interest in AI policy displayed by the Biden administration.
Shortly after returning to the Oval Office, President Donald Trump repealed a Biden-era executive order that hamstrung AI development. As former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently observed, such efforts are akin to regulating the Wright brothers before the first flight ever got off the ground.
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But the Trump administration isn’t merely removing roadblocks to AI progress put in place by its predecessor. Rather, the president and his team have recognized that the rise of AI is both inevitable and central to competition with China. Accordingly, they’ve gone on offense. As importantly, they recognize that the AI arms race, like arms races before it, will require allies and reliable supply chains.
These facts spurred the U.S. State Department to launch Pax Silica in December 2025. State called it “a U.S.-led strategic initiative to build a secure, prosperous and innovation driven silicon supply chain–from critical minerals and energy inputs to advanced manufacturing, semiconductors, AI infrastructure, and logistics.”
Pax Silica “aims to reduce coercive dependencies, protect the materials and capabilities foundational to artificial intelligence, and ensure aligned nations can develop and deploy transformative technologies at scale.”
In layman’s terms, the U.S. is building a coalition, or bloc, to cooperate and collaborate on AI and advanced technologies. The need to do so is obvious — and it extends beyond China’s rapid rise in tech and Beijing’s ability to produce at scale. The COVID-19 crisis and recent events, such as the Strait of Hormuz closure, keenly highlight the need to shore up America’s supply chains and protect both its economy and national security.
Jacob Helberg, the U.S. Undersecretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment, has been at the forefront of the Pax Silica initiative. Helberg said Pax Silica is an “economic security coalition based on the recognition that the supply chain is connected and geographically dispersed.” There is, he noted, a “vast web” of complicated vendors throughout the world. Both the sheer complexity of the supply chain and growing threats to disrupt it led the Trump administration to adopt a forward-leaning approach.
Pax Silica seeks to ensure that the “most economically important companies have access to reliable and secure supply chains and are not disrupted or held hostage by geopolitical events,” Helberg said in an interview with the Washington Examiner. At its core, the initiative is about “the future of economic growth” and ensuring that America’s “tech ecosystem stays in the lead” and continues to have access to the markets and materials that it needs.
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A little more than three months in, Helberg was optimistic about the future of Pax Silica. The undersecretary noted that a growing number of countries have joined because “they recognize that economic growth is going to flow at every step of the AI chain.”
Pax Silica’s core members include the U.S., Japan, South Korea, Australia, Israel, Singapore, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and India. On March 17, Sweden became the first member of the European Union to sign the Pax Silica Declaration. Sweden’s decision to do so is significant for reasons beyond its EU membership.
Sweden is home to Ericsson, the telecommunications giant and arguably the only competitor to China’s Huawei in many key markets. As Helberg said, “We hope that Sweden will open the door for other EU countries.” Indeed, Sweden’s ascension is tremendously significant and is a good omen for Pax Silica’s future.
When asked what advantages the U.S. has in its AI competition with China, Helberg noted that Pax Silica has “the world’s best countries” and that it was easier for America to build a coalition because “we are positive sum.”
Pax Silica, Helberg said, “was not a containment strategy but a construction strategy” that is meant to encourage growth among allied and aligned countries. “We want a peaceful future that is positive sum and that allows our companies to thrive,” the Undersecretary said. It is, he said, very much a private sector-driven initiative.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. As Helberg noted, whoever wins the AI race will have the strongest military and the strongest economy. That could be the U.S. and its allies, or it could be Communist China and the so-called “Axis of Autocracies,” including Iran, North Korea, and Russia.
In recognition of this fact, on March 20, the White House unveiled its National AI Legislative Framework. The announcement was a delicate balancing act between those who were understandably worried about the tremendous change that some analysts believe AI will bring, and those who believe America can ill afford to overregulate a cutting-edge technology that is increasingly at the center of geopolitical competition. Importantly, the framework came out against “a patchwork of conflicting state laws” that “would undermine American innovation and our ability to lead in the global AI race.”
The federal government, the White House noted, is “uniquely positioned to set a consistent national policy that enables us to win the AI race and deliver its benefits to the American people, while effectively addressing the policy challenges that accompany this transformative technology.”
Once again, the Trump administration’s approach to AI is clear. The administration, recognizing the transformative effects of the technology, is seeking to be proactive, not reactive like its predecessor. In an AI race against China, no other approach will work.
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Communist China, after all, is nothing if not ambitious. Under the regime’s founder, Mao Zedong, an estimated 40 million to 80 million people died, the vast majority under Mao’s attempt to modernize, the so-called Great Leap Forward. China’s dystopian dreams run contrary to the very traditions that make America great.
As Albert Einstein reportedly said: “The human spirit must prevail over technology.” That is, we must remain the masters of technology and not the other way around. For this to happen, the U.S. and the free world must win. And that path to victory starts now.
