Vance Outlines an America First, America Only AI Agenda

The Trump administration has wasted no time in overhauling the federal government’s approach to artificial intelligence. Mere days after taking office, President Trump rescinded President Biden’s October 2023 AI executive order and put his own in its place, swapping the Biden policy’s emphasis on safety, regulatory oversight, and international cooperation with his own policy aim of AI dominance. 

The administration’s forthcoming AI Action Plan likely will shed light on what exactly AI dominance entails. But in the interim, Vice President J.D. Vance has been filling in the blanks, at least partially.

Vance has been one of the administration’s most vocal proponents of this new AI vision. Speaking at the Paris AI Action Summit last month, he laid out a sharp critique of what he deemed “excessive regulation” and signaled a willingness for the United States to chart its own course, even if that meant breaking from allies. Vance’s remarks clarified that the administration sees AI not as a problem to be managed, but as an opportunity to be seized. Gone is the Biden administration’s rhetoric on existential risk and the need for AI safety guardrails. Instead, the new White House approach prioritizes speed, power, and control over the global AI landscape. More specifically, Vance stressed the administration's AI policy would turn on four points: first, perpetuation of America's AI offerings serving as the "gold standard worldwide"; second, adoption of a deregulatory agenda at home and abroad; third, prevention of AI being "co-opted into a tool for authoritarian censorship"; and, fourth, development of a "pro-worker growth path for AI."

Each of those points requires a lot more detail. Vance’s recent address at the American Dynamism Summit hosted by venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) provided the clearest articulation yet of how the administration plans to achieve AI dominance, with a particular emphasis on what a pro-worker growth path involves. The summit, focused on strengthening America’s industrial base and ensuring the country’s economic and military resilience, was an ideal venue for Vance to expand on the administration’s priorities. His speech, which painted AI as the cornerstone of a new American industrial renaissance, revolved around three central themes: 1) deregulation as a catalyst for AI growth; 2) AI as a national security imperative; and 3) government as a market maker. This essay details those themes before analyzing whether they add up to a coherent AI policy approach. Given that the speech was relatively light on specific policies, that latter task is easier said than done. Still, a close read of the speech provides a sketch of an underlying AI doctrine.

The Trump administration's AI strategy, as articulated by Vance in his latest speech, represents a dramatic shift toward an "America First, America Only" approach that aims to unite techno-optimists and populists under a vision of industrial renaissance. However, the contradictions between deregulation and protectionist tariffs, coupled with the administration's reluctance to engage with international allies or, at least so far, invest in worker reskilling, raises serious questions about whether this approach can achieve AI dominance while delivering on its promise to create widespread prosperity for American workers.

Deregulation and the Rejection of Safety-Centric AI Policy

The administration believes that regulatory barriers are the primary obstacle to U.S. AI supremacy. Vance framed the previous administration’s approach as overly cautious and bureaucratic, arguing that America must move away from compliance-heavy frameworks and embrace a permissionless innovation model that will spur new economic development and jobs. He also faulted prior administrations for becoming “addicted” to cheap labor abroad at the expense of the well-being of Americans.

A central message of Vance’s speech was the administration’s full departure from the safety-first approach of its predecessor. While Biden’s AI executive order aimed to establish guidelines for risk assessment, ethical safeguards, and bias mitigation, Vance dismissed these concerns as obstacles to progress.

In response to what Vance called “pushback” following his Paris address that he was not attentive enough to the disruptive effects of AI—including joblessness—he defended and doubled-down on his remarks through appeals to his Catholic faith. Quoting Pope John Paul II, Vance shared, “Through work man must earn his daily bread and contribute to the continual advance of science and technology and, above all, to elevating unceasingly the cultural and moral level of the society within which he lives in.” According to Vance, this message calls for leaning into technology, rather than fearing it. He pointed to bank tellers as an example of a profession that has thrived despite being exposed to innovation. Though empirical evidence of economic well-being of tellers suggests he painted an overly rosy picture, Vance insisted that a pro-technology mindset aligns with our “American heritage of inventing things.”

He also recognized but contested fears that mass adoption of AI would lead to social isolation and a loss of purpose. He argued that centering the manufacture and design of emerging technologies in the U.S. would align the interests of techno-optimists and populists, alike, providing the former with an opportunity to build and the latter with access to the jobs of the future. In short, both have cause for championing innovation, by which Vance meant removing undue regulatory hurdles. This approach would herald a “Great American Industrial Comeback.”

This rhetorical shift underscores, highlights, and double-clicks on a fundamental policy change: the administration does not see AI as a potential existential threat or even as an immediate risk, but as an inevitable and necessary tool for American economic and military power. To facilitate that change, Vance announced that the administration would “cut your taxes, . . . slash regulations, . . . reduce the cost of energy” so that American firms could “build, build, build.”

AI and National Security: The Strategic Imperative

The speech made clear that AI development is not just an economic priority, but a matter of national security. Vance positioned AI dominance as essential to maintaining U.S. military and geopolitical superiority, particularly in competition with China.

Throughout his remarks, Vance tied AI development to national security in explicit terms. He declared that the “innovation is key to winning the worldwide competition,” a framing that suggests the administration sees AI advancement in military-strategic, rather than purely economic, terms. China, Vance warned, “will not pass up on any opportunity to use AI or any other technology to advance their own interests and further undermine the interests of their rivals.” 

The speech highlighted the Trump administration’s emphasis on “America’s builders”—meaning the firms and executives in attendance at the Summit—and their role in global AI competition, especially in the race against China. “It’s time to align the interests of our technology firms with the interests of the United States of America writ large,” Vance proclaimed. He applauded the fact that any of the attendees could have set up operations in Southeast Asia or China, but instead showed up at this Summit and centered their operations in the US—he presumed because they love their country.  

Vance also addressed concerns about China’s AI ambitions, pointing to Beijing’s state-backed AI research and deployment. The administration, he suggested, will counter China’s efforts with a strategy that combines aggressive technological development with strategic decoupling from Chinese AI supply chains. 

Government Intervention

Despite his critique of regulatory oversight, Vance’s speech made clear that the administration envisions an active federal role in shaping the AI ecosystem. He connected several of the administration’s early policy maneuvers in related fields to assisting with AI specifically and the idea of an American Industrial Renaissance generally. President Trump, Vance said, “is dead serious about rearranging our trade and tariff regime internationally.” This policy reflects their shared belief that “tariffs are a necessary tool to protect our jobs and our industries.” Vance also connected the president’s efforts to “crack down” on illegal immigration to the matter of AI acceleration and industrial revival. This border policy will correct for excessive reliance on foreign labor and ensure new jobs created via AI and other key industries go to American citizens, per the Vice President. Finally, Vance touted the work of Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior, to increase energy production by removing environmental regulations. He expects removal of red tape will aid AI development due to the immense energy demands of the data centers.

Trump’s Emerging America First, America Only AI Doctrine

Trying to synthesize a coherent AI Trump Doctrine from his EOs and Vance’s positioning speeches is akin to solving a puzzle without the box and the border pieces. Deregulation and tariffs are rarely complementary. It’s likewise hard to square a call for unimpeded technological progress with the well-being of current workers—America has a poor track record when it comes to upskilling workers for a new economy. But one way to understand the emerging AI Trump Doctrine is as an extension of his administration’s “America First, America Only” policies. 

The America First prong calls for all necessary steps to ensure the U.S. remains the leader in AI innovation. This approach has already resulted in substantive policy, such as the deregulatory energy initiatives that Vance mentioned, as well as in political messaging, such as when Trump tapped OpenAI”s Sam Altman and Oracle’s Larry Ellison to announce the Stargate Project, a private effort to build at least 20 AI datacenters, in the Oval Office. What’s unclear is which actor or combination of actors will lead America to the frontier. Impending cuts to staff at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and doubts as to the administration’s willingness to carry out the CHIPS Act signal a smaller role for the government in pushing the US to the top of AI leaderboards. Realization of that goal without the government seeding R&D and sharing its expertise will turn on the success of private labs. If this is correct, the forthcoming AI Action Plan will contain much of what the biggest labs called for, such as copyright reform and perpetuation of export controls.

The America Only prong reflects the administration’s attempt to unite so-called techno-optimists and populists by making pursuant of AI dominance contingent on using a domestic AI industrial base. Achieving AI dominance would be far easier if the administration were to welcome brilliant foreign scholars to join our efforts. Yet, Vance’s speech showed few signs of immigration reform that would increase the number of high-skill workers. It may also be easier (or at least a less fragile endeavor) if Trump had spent his first few months building stronger ties with the allies responsible for overseeing key parts of the AI supply chain. Instead, Vance warned the EU that the nation wasn’t looking for co-founders—the administration seems confident that the AI race is not a team sport.

A willingness to go it alone on the international stage demonstrates the administration’s focus on a closed-loop AI ecosystem--one that starts and ends in the U.S. Though this may impede the rate of technical progress, administration officials may suspect that forcing AI development to occur domestically will reduce the odds of a techlash that might ground progress to a halt. How this prong may show up in the AI Action Plan is less clear. It seems unlikely that the administration will invest in a new generation of reskilling opportunities given its evisceration of the Department of Education. It’s also doubtful that the administration will turn to higher education institutions to increase the AI talent pipeline. The administration has substantially cut research funds intended for colleges and universities and increased scrutiny of related federal grants. Schools have responded by freezing hiring and cutting staff--all steps that do not bode well for an increase in grads with AI expertise. Perhaps America Only will appear most obviously through an even stricter export control regime that chokes the supply of chips to anyone other than a handful of countries, with the U.S. receiving the lion’s share of each new chip production run.