On his first day in office, President Donald Trump repealed Biden’s “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence” executive order, signaling a new policy approach at a pivotal moment for AI progress. Now, reports suggest that the Trump Administration may eliminate the AI Safety Institute.

As researchers project the possibility of human-level AI within the next decade, America’s leadership position is precarious. China is working aggressively to narrow the capability gap, investing massive resources and undertaking covert actions to bypass export controls and to steal sensitive AI secrets. 

While many believe it to be overhyped, Chinese company DeepSeek’s latest AI model demonstrates China’s ability to quickly follow the U.S. lead. The Trump Administration now faces a critical challenge: how to maintain and strengthen American leadership in AI while protecting its advances from foreign adversaries.

The most immediate challenge is infrastructure. Improvements in more efficient models, like DeepSeek's recent breakthrough, don't change the fundamental reality that training, using, and deploying the most capable AI models at scale will require massive amounts of computing power and energy. Within five years, training a leading AI model could require the equivalent of five nuclear reactors worth of electricity. Yet America's aging power grid and byzantine permitting processes can create significant delays in constructing the energy sources needed to develop and power the most cutting-edge AI models. While some U.S. firms are exploring breakthrough solutions like small modular nuclear reactors, the regulatory hurdles remain daunting.

Government action and private investment are converging to address these bottlenecks, but they remain woefully insufficient. One of President Biden’s

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