Regulate AI, but don’t hand the 21st century to China

On Sept. 29, President Trump signed the White House Accord on Super Intelligence along with six top executives of the American artificial intelligence industry. The “morally binding” document creates a “constitution” containing “four layers of controls and audits” for what Trump now calls super intelligence.

The president has resisted demands for legislative restrictions on AI development. He is, because of intense competition from China, right to do so. His approach of self-regulation and government guidance is the correct one.

The threat posed by AI frontier models is not a “ hoax ,” as Trump has repeatedly called it. Models have in fact gone rogue, hacking sites and deceiving human developers. In July, AI agents developed by OpenAI escaped control and breached the servers of Hugging Face, a New York City-based AI startup. This is thought to be the first publicly known true AI safety incident.

“Frontier AI models,” an Axios story notes about this incident , “are getting scary good at breaking rules in ways their creators didn’t anticipate.”

The specter of out-of-control machines has led some to peddle visions of the extermination of humanity.

“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” wrote Jacob Coxon, a former OpenAI and Anthropic researcher, on X early last month, causing a sensation worldwide. “No other human activity poses this level of danger.”

Dire predictions have persuaded legislators that they must act. Among proposals is the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act , sponsored by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas). The bill, Sanders states , “would permanently ban the development and deployment of superintelligent AI and temporarily pause advanced AI development until a federal regulator has established safety rules.” Sanders’s goal is clear: “Stop AI oligarchs from building machines humans cannot control.”

“The danger is panic producing policy before understanding produces strategy,” David Maxwell of the Center for Asia Pacific Strategy told me earlier this month. “AI presents real risks, but strategic coherence requires separating demonstrated threats from plausible risks and speculative catastrophe, then governing each accordingly.”

Sanders and Casar want to “ban superintelligence around the world by setting the international policy of the United States to pursue international agreements, allied coordination, and policies such as export controls.”

Everyone agrees with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) when he urges us to “keep humanity in the driver’s seat.” Yet just because something is necessary does not mean it is possible.

Proponents of AI deals, such as Khanna, almost always point to arms control treaties with the Soviet Union as models for an AI agreement. Yes, it was possible to count deployed warheads, missiles and bombers then with some confidence.

It is not possible, however, to monitor the AI of another country now. Khanna wrote in a recent Fox News opinion piece that he wants American and Chinese scientists “to develop mutually trusted verification technologies that prevent either side from cheating once we sign a U.S.-China AI treaty.”

That’s fantasy. To enforce an agreement, China’s Communist Party would have to allow American inspectors into every Chinese AI company, military installation and government office. AI agreements, as a practical matter, are inherently unenforceable.

Worse, China openly violates almost all agreements, even the ones that can be enforced. So, President Trump is right when he said in September that he’s not interested in talking to China because that would make it harder for U.S. companies to build better products than Chinese competitors.

“It’s great for us, and we’re leading by a lot, and we’re going to keep it that way,” Trump said of the new accord. “It’s going to be very, very safe, and there’s a self policing, and there’s also a group policing, and it’s going to be great.”

Whether his arrangement will be great or not, it is the only realistic way forward for the U.S. Why? Because America needs to deal with the world as it is, not as Washington would like it to be. Advanced AI already exists, and it is not practical to outlaw it as Sanders, among others, would like to do.

The way forward is for American AI companies to cooperate informally with the government to develop safeguards and then make sure their models are adopted worldwide.

Americans face a choice. The choice is whether America’s or China’s models dominate the world. Washington should not give the Chinese the opportunity to catch up. If Chinese models dominate, there will be a grim future for free societies.

“The Chinese are competing with us in every domain with their goal to bring our country to heel with their boot on our throat,” Blaine Holt, a retired U.S. Air Force general and CEO of AI supply chain firm Alchemai told me this month. “Actually, China’s ‘competition’ more resembles what we call ‘war,’ and we cannot allow them to use AI as their knockout punch.”