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"Build, Baby, Build" – Inside Trump's Plan to Win the Global AI Arms Race

• By John K. Waters
• 07/24/2025

"Breakthroughs in these fields have the potential to reshape the global balance of power… It is a national security imperative for the United States to achieve and maintain unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance."
—President Donald J. Trump, "Winning the Race: America's AI Action Plan"

In January 2025, on his second first day in the Oval Office, Donald Trump signed an executive order with a title that left no doubt: "Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence." Six months later, that order has evolved into a 28-page technonationalist blueprint called "Winning the Race: America's AI Action Plan," and it's unlike any government strategy on artificial intelligence the world has yet seen.

The plan doesn't just aim to regulate or encourage AI innovation; it's a battle cry for global supremacy. It fuses AI with energy policy, industrial planning, defense modernization, and even judicial reform, stitched together by a no-holds-barred rejection of "bureaucratic red tape," "climate dogma," and "top-down ideological bias."

"Winning the AI race will usher in a new golden age of human flourishing," the plan declares. "An industrial revolution, an information revolution, and a renaissance—all at once."

Deregulate First, Ask Questions Later
From the outset, the Trump administration has framed regulation as the enemy. Executive Order 14179 ("Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence") cancels Biden-era AI safeguards. He also cancelled EO 14110 ("Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence"), which emphasized safety and civil rights. In contrast, Trump's AI doctrine is clear: get out of the way.

Agencies have been directed to slash rules that "unduly burden AI development," with specific mandates for the FCC, FTC, and even state funding decisions. In his remarks during the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit, held in February in Paris, France, Vice President J.D. Vance said that such regulation would "paralyze one of the most promising technologies we have seen in generations."

"We have to prioritize winning the AI race," David O. Sacks, the PayPal Mafia alum turned White House crypto-AI czar, told CNBC this week. "And we have to make sure that regulation is sensible. We're not saying that there shouldn't be any regulation. But we don't want there to be so much of it that it hobbles our AI companies and our innovation. And we also don't want so many different regulatory regimes that it creates a patchwork [in the states] and is confusing to our AI companies."

From LLMs to Munitions
The plan's scope veers far beyond generative chatbots. It promotes AI adoption across federal agencies, including the establishment of a new Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer Council, inter-agency talent exchanges, and AI procurement pipelines for applications ranging from IRS audits to battlefield logistics.

The Department of Defense will establish a dedicated AI & Autonomous Systems Virtual Proving Ground. At the same time, America's senior military colleges will become "AI hubs" that teach warfighting applications of machine learning.

In the event of a cyber conflict, the plan lays the groundwork for emergency computing resource mobilization, essentially giving the Pentagon priority access to U.S. AI infrastructure during wartime.

"Winning the AI Race is non-negotiable," said Secretary of State and Acting National Security Advisor Marco Rubio, in a statement. "America must continue to be the dominant force in artificial intelligence to promote prosperity and protect our economic and national security."

The Infrastructure Moonshot
Winning the AI race, according to the report, means a whole-of-the-economy reboot. Think semiconductors + power grid + data centers + skilled trades—a fusion of Silicon Valley and Rust Belt dreams.

Trump's team advocates for deregulation of clean energy, expansion of the power grid, and expedited environmental approvals for hyperscale data centers and chip foundries.

"AI is the first digital service that challenges America to build vastly greater energy generation than we have today," the report warns.

To support the push, federal agencies are creating skills pipelines for AI-relevant trades—electricians, HVAC techs, robotics engineers—with a heavy emphasis on vocational training and apprenticeships.

Open-Weight Models: America's New Soft Power
One of the plan's subtler but more consequential moves is its embrace of open-source and open-weight AI models. While OpenAI and Anthropic have pushed proprietary models, the Trump plan aims to make American open-weight models the global standard for research, small business, and allied military applications.

That includes maturing the compute financial market (think AWS futures) and building public-private research pipelines via the National AI Research Resource (NAIRR) pilot.

"Open-weight models have unique value for innovation," the plan notes. "They also have geostrategic value."

Red Teams, Deepfakes, and Biosecurity
The administration acknowledges that powerful AI tools could be abused, but its solution isn't tight controls—it's aggressive red-teaming and evaluations. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is tasked with new interpretability and robustness programs. NIST will formalize forensic standards to combat AI-generated legal evidence, including deepfakes.

Meanwhile, a chilling section on biosecurity mandates DNA synthesis monitoring at federally funded research labs to prevent the misuse of AI in creating pathogens.

Allies and Enemies
Geopolitically, the plan is forthright: export U.S. models, chips, and infrastructure to allies; block China at every international governance forum.

"The distribution and diffusion of American technology will stop our strategic rivals from making our allies dependent on foreign adversary technology," the plan asserts.

To that end, the U.S. will push for plurilateral export controls, require chipmakers to use location-verification tech, and pursue secondary tariffs on non-cooperative allies.

The Bottom Line
"Build, Baby, Build" may be a slogan born in the oil fields, but in 2025, it's been repurposed as an AI doctrine. "Winning the Race: America's AI Action Plan" is not a cautionary document—it's a campaign of acceleration. Whether it yields a new golden age or an era of unchecked machine power will depend less on the models and more on the politics shaping them.

As the report itself warns: "The opportunity that stands before us is both inspiring and humbling. And it is ours to seize, or to lose."