America cannot afford to blink on AI supremacy

The New York Post reports that Speaker Johnson is calling for AI executives to meet with Congress and the White House on safety questions — but flatly refuses a moratorium because, in his words, the United States cannot cede ground to China. On both counts he is, I think, correct in instinct if not yet complete in remedy.

I spent the better part of my public life arguing that manufactures are not a luxury but a strategic necessity. When I wrote the Report on the Subject of Manufactures in 1791, I urged that a nation dependent on foreign industry for its sinews of production is a nation at the mercy of rivals. I could not have imagined a technology that reasons, writes, and designs at machine speed — but the principle transfers without alteration. Whoever commands the productive intelligence of the next era commands the commerce, the logistics, the military advantage, and ultimately the credit of nations. To voluntarily stand down from that contest is not caution; it is abdication.

Yet I am not prepared to simply cheer industry on and avert my eyes from its concentration. The New York Post's lead notes that AI leaders themselves have issued warnings that edge toward the apocalyptic. I take such warnings neither lightly nor at face value — men of great commercial power have an interest in making their domain sound too dangerous and too complex for any hand but their own to touch. I have seen that argument before. It is the argument of every monopolist who ever asked government to ratify his position by pretending it cannot be regulated. Concentrated private power that escapes its lawful check is precisely what a sound republic must resist.

So here is what Congress must do — and it is more than a meeting. First, establish the terms of public accountability: if these systems underpin financial markets, payment networks, logistics, and national communications, then they are infrastructure, and infrastructure answers to the public interest. Second, fund domestic capacity aggressively — in chips, in energy, in the research institutions that train the talent. A moratorium unilaterally imposed is folly; a strategic investment program is not. Third, and most critically, do not mistake energy for recklessness: an energetic government is not a careless one. Set the rules, enforce them, and let American enterprise run hard within them.

The Strait of Hormuz is struck, and the headlines fill with the immediate peril. But the slower danger — the one that compounds quietly, like interest on a neglected debt — is falling behind in the technology that will determine who has leverage over whom in every domain that follows. Public credit rests on productive capacity. Productive capacity rests on industrial leadership. Industrial leadership in 2026 runs, in no small part, through artificial intelligence. Congress should not merely meet with these executives. It should emerge from that meeting with a framework, a budget, and a mandate. Anything less is theater.