Do AI Companies Actually Care About America?

“Democratic AI” is great branding for the Trump era.

Excerpt: "Silicon Valley’s tech giants have recast the AI boom not just as a matter of scientific and economic advancement but as a clash of civilizations. They are fixated on competition with China, and the idea that Chinese AI, should it outpace its American counterpart, will extend a repressive surveillance stateinto the rest of the world. Despite the rhetoric, however, it is not at all clear that AI companies are doing anything themselves to uphold American freedom. In fact, they seem much more interested in what America can do for them.

China is not a new worry. For many years, Eric Schmidt, Sheryl Sandberg, and other tech leaders have warned about the need to outpace China in various technologies—including AI, quantum computing, and 5G—but these concerns have become louder since the launch of ChatGPT. Dario Amodei, the CEO of OpenAI’s rival Anthropic, wrote last fall that “AI-powered authoritarianism seems too terrible to contemplate.” Democracies, he continued, must band together to stay ahead.

Certain American ideals have always been embedded in Silicon Valley—individualism, the belief that you can build anything you can dream of, the promise that hard work will pay off. But where the previous tech revolution—the arrival of the social web and smartphones—was described by tech titans as a path toward global connection and democratization worldwide, the arrival of artificial intelligence has taken on a decidedly “America First” flavor."