Countries that build the most AI infrastructure today will reap the greatest rewards in the coming Intelligence Age.

Yet debates about AI investment often wrongly frame it as a binary decision: Build at home or fund projects abroad. That’s a false distinction and a losing strategy. To ensure democratic values shape the future of artificial intelligence, countries need to invest in themselves — and in American AI infrastructure.

As my boss, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, wrote last summer, only the U.S. and China have the resources and capacity to shape the future trajectory of AI and determine whether it advances in ways that protect freedom, dignity and human agency or whether it becomes a tool of surveillance and repression.

Ensuring that democratic values shape the future of AI is the most urgent challenge of our time, and we need to seize this moment and think big, act big and build big — both here and abroad — to ensure that it prevails over authoritarian AI in the competition over the technology’s future.

The world is not divided neatly into allies and adversaries. Many countries are navigating complex choices as they evaluate what kind of AI systems — and what kinds of values — they wish to adopt. Supporting these nations is not just about competition. It is about offering a meaningful alternative: a version of AI development that upholds individual rights, resists central control and aligns with the long-standing principles of transparency and fairness embedded in the international system. That system isn’t perfect, but reforming it from within........

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