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President Trump’s new executive order on artificial intelligence reflects an old American instinct: don’t choke the next great technology before it has a chance to grow. We’ve been here before. In the 1990s, Washington — under President Bill Clinton — largely resisted heavy state or local regulation of the early internet. That decision helped America dominate the digital age while the rest of the world played catch-up.
Trump is clearly drawing from that playbook.
His order pushes back on a growing maze of state-level AI rules that threaten to slow innovation just as the global AI race is heating up. That matters because this is not a friendly competition. Communist China is racing full throttle to dominate artificial intelligence, pouring state money into AI systems tied directly to surveillance, censorship and military power. Beijing doesn’t have 50 states arguing over rules. It has one plan — and it’s executing it.
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On that front, Trump is right: America cannot afford to regulate itself into second place.
But speed alone won’t save us.
As I warn in my 2025 book "AI for Mankind’s Future," artificial intelligence is not just the internet all over again. AI doesn’t just connect people, it evaluates them. It decides who gets a loan, who gets hired, who gets flagged, who gets silenced and, increasingly, who gets targeted on the battlefield. It scales power faster than any technology in history, and when it goes wrong, it goes wrong at machine speed.
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We already know how this story can end. The internet grew fast — and only later did Americans realize the cost: lost privacy, online manipulation, monopolies, digital surveillance and nonstop disinformation. Washington waited too long to act, and now we’re stuck trying to bolt guardrails onto systems that are already embedded in daily life.
AI compresses that danger into years, not decades.
Trump’s executive order aptly calls out the danger of a state-by-state regulatory patchwork. But there’s a flip side Americans should worry about just as much. An executive order can block the states — but it doesn’t automatically protect the people. If state authority is chilled and Congress fails to act, we don’t get "smart regulation." We get a regulatory vacuum.
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And in that vacuum, regular Americans lose.
Children are exposed to predatory AI systems. Workers are displaced without warning or retraining. Deepfakes flood elections and financial scams explode. Algorithms quietly make life-altering decisions, and no one can explain — or challenge — how they were made.
China understands exactly what it’s doing. AI there is already fused with state surveillance, social credit scoring and military planning. U.S. intelligence officials have warned that the AI race is existential. If America loses, we don’t just lose tech jobs — we lose strategic freedom.
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But winning doesn’t mean copying China’s model or turning AI loose with no rules.
The real challenge is proving that a free society can lead in AI without surrendering human judgment, liberty and dignity to machines. That requires national leadership — not 50 state rulebooks, but also not blind faith in technology.
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Trump is right to demand speed and unity. Now Washington must deliver substance: clear federal guardrails that protect innovation while defending citizens.
If we repeat the internet era’s mistakes — moving fast and thinking later— we may win the race and still lose the country we’re trying to defend.
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Robert Maginnis is a retired U.S. Army officer and the author of 13 books. His latest is "AI for Mankind’s Future."
