Trump and the China AI War By Howard Bloom

Wednesday, July 23^rd, at 5 pm in a keynote address to the White House “Winning the Race” AI Summit at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington, D.C., Donald Trump issued his AI Action Plan. His Artificial Intelligence Action Plan.

That plan called for unleashing innovation by removing the barriers of federal regulation. It called for fast–tracking data center permits and allowing vast buildings filled with computer servers on federal lands.

It called for open-source and open-weight models that make their inner workings public. And it demanded that all AIs remove “woke” bias.

Said President Trump, “As our global competitors race to exploit these technologies, it is a national security imperative for the United States to achieve and maintain unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance.”

Trump added that, “We need to establish American AI…as the gold standard for AI worldwide and ensure our allies are building on American technology”.

What was the big prod jolting this AI Action plan into being? China. Here’s the story.

Donald Trump first showed an interest in AI six years ago, in February 2019, when he signed “the American AI Initiative, the first executive order focused on AI by a U.S. president.” That order aimed to speed up research and development, to set AI standards, and to promote education in AI.

Eleven months later, the president issued another order encouraging AI use in the government.

Donald Trump was ahead of his time. Two years later, in November, 2022, Sam Altman’s ChatGPT would hit computer screens all over the world and would utterly change the way computers satisfy our curiosities.

ChatGPT was a massive hit. Within five days of its introduction, it had won a million users. ChatGPT would be followed by AIs from Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Anthropic.

And AI would get support from the Biden administration, which established seven National Institutes of AI Research and funneled roughly ten billion dollars into AI.

But, as you know, Donald Trump sees everything Joe Biden did as a disaster and a train wreck. So the day President Trump was inaugurated, he repealed one of Joe Biden’s executive orders on AI.

That’s when Trump ordered a new AI Action Plan, one that would remove red tape, bust bureaucratic bottlenecks, and downsize government regulation.

So far, President Trump’s focus had been on setting AI free. But Trump had inherited from Biden a passel of American AI’s that seemingly led the world. Why seemingly?

Because the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration, on January 20, 2025 there had been a time bomb, the launch of a Chinese AI competitor, Deepseek-R1.

On January 27, 2025, a mere week into Donald Trump’s reign, DeepSeek had bested all the American AIs and had gone to number one on Apple’s American App Store, triumphing over the former number one, ChatGPT.

Not only did DeepSeek seem as good as ChatGPT, but its creators claimed it had been radically cheaper to make. Which meant that the giant computer server farms for which American companies were raising billions might be totally unnecessary.

The result was catastrophic. The success of China’s DeepSeek led to a massive market selloff of American AI stocks, wiping out almost $600 billion in market value in a single day, the biggest one-day drop in market history. By the end of the next day, the stock market had shed an unbelievable trillion dollars in value. All because of a Chinese AI.

That’s when it became urgently clear that leadership in AI would be central to maintaining America’s leadership of the world. That’s when AI went from a mere technological issue to a geopolitical emergency, “with AI viewed as the next frontier in great-power competition.”

Or, to put it in the terms Donald Trump used in his speech June 23rd at the White House AI Summit, “it is a national security imperative for the United States to achieve and maintain unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance.” In other words, it’s imperative for America to continue to lead the world in artificial intelligence.

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About the author: Howard Bloom of the Howard Bloom Institute has been called the Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. Bloom’s new book is The Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature is Wrong. Says Harvard’s Ellen Langer of The Case of the Sexual Cosmos, Bloom “argues that we are not savaging the earth as some would have it, but instead are growing the cosmos. A fascinating read.” One of Bloom’s eight previous books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. Bloom’s work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. Not to mention in scientific journals like Biosystems, New Ideas in Psychology, and PhysicaPlus. Says Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of Evolution’s End and The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, “I have finished Howard Bloom’s [first two] books, The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain, in that order, and am seriously awed, near overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he has done. I never expected to see, in any form, from any sector, such an accomplishment. I doubt there is a stronger intellect than Bloom’s on the planet.” For more, see http://howardbloom.net or http://howardbloom.institute

Resources:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/07/white-house-unveils-americas-ai-action-plan/

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2019/02/14/2019-02544/maintaining-american-leadership-in-artificial-intelligence

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/executive-order-13960-promoting-the-use-trustworthy-artificial-intelligence-the-federal

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R47843

https://www.commerce.gov/news/press-releases/2024/10/commerce-marks-one-year-anniversary-historic-biden-harris

https://www.nsf.gov/news/nsf-announces-7-new-national-artificial

https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/10/30/fact-sheet-key-ai-accomplishments-in-the-year-since-the-biden-harris-administrations-landmark-executive-order/

https://fedscoop.com/biden-administration-requests-3b-for-federal-ai-application-development-procurement-and-integration-in-2025-budget/

https://www.nextgov.com/policy/2024/03/bidens-167-trillion-budget-boosts-tech-ai/394841/

https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/09/12/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-secures-voluntary-commitments-from-eight-additional-artificial-intelligence-companies-to-manage-the-risks-posed-by-ai/

https://newsroom.intel.com/corporate/intel-chips-act