Winning the AI Race
The White House Strategy for Innovation, Infrastructure, and International Diplomacy
Hello, I'm Ylli Bajraktari, CEO of the Special Competitive Studies Project. In this edition of SCSP's newsletter, we distill key takeaways from the White House’s recently released AI Action plan, accompanied by three executive orders.
Read our full press release on the AI Action Plan here.
Winning the AI Race
The White House's release of America’s AI Action Plan, accompanied by three executive orders, marks the most consequential artificial intelligence policy development of the Trump Administration to date. It arrives at a pivotal moment in AI, defined by rapid technological progress, geopolitical competition, and a reordering of global scientific leadership.
The AI Action Plan reinforces and accelerates the Administration’s existing strategy of pursuing American AI dominance. It builds on prior efforts to accelerate innovation and dismantle regulatory barriers. It asserts U.S. leadership across the AI stack, from frontier model development to compute infrastructure and energy dominance around the world. The three executive orders, one dedicated toward fast tracking data center permitting, the second focused on ensuring American global AI dominance, and the third working towards ideological neutrality in AI models procured and promoted by the federal government, catalyze tangible action in these realms.
This posture aligns closely with recommendations put forward by the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP), including in our response to the Office of Science and Technology Policy’s Request for Information (OSTP RFI). SCSP supports a bold, innovation-driven approach that advances American values, safeguards national security, and promotes targeted oversight of high-consequence AI applications.
Advancing AI Dominance Through Deregulation
The AI Action Plan emphasizes a regulatory approach tailored towards advancing technological progress. At the federal level, the OSTP will issue an RFI to identify policies that hinder AI innovation. OMB will coordinate reforms to streamline or eliminate those rules. These actions are consistent with Executive Order 14192, “Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation,” which directs agencies to identify and revise or repeal policies that unnecessarily constrain AI development. Additionally, federal agencies with AI-related discretionary funding will be encouraged to consider a state’s AI regulatory climate when awarding funds, ensuring that federal resources support innovation rather than reinforce restrictive regimes. The Plan also outlines reforms to Federal Trade Commission investigations that may have imposed undue liability burdens on AI innovators, in line with SCSP’s recommendation to focus oversight on high-consequence applications.
The Plan outlines the development of secure, classified computing environments to support the safe deployment of sensitive models, as well as the creation of new technical standards for high-security AI data centers. These initiatives are designed to ensure that government AI workloads, especially in defense and intelligence, are run on infrastructure hardened against insider threats and nation-state actors. To build out a secure-by-design ecosystem, the Plan calls for investment in the science of AI assurance, interpretability, robustness, and control.The Department of Homeland Security, Department of Commerce (DOC), Department of Defense (DoD), and the intelligence community will coordinate to establish new testing frameworks, launch red-teaming initiatives, and support AI incident response readiness across critical sectors. The federal government will also assess the potential risks of deploying adversary-developed AI systems within U.S. infrastructure and explore the presence of backdoors or malign foreign influence.
Infrastructure Advancement
The AI Action Plan dedicates an entire pillar to infrastructure development, recognizing that gigawatt-scale compute and abundant power are foundational to U.S. competitiveness in the AI era. A separate executive order will direct the Department of Energy (DOE) to identify federally controlled sites suitable for hosting advanced data centers and associated power infrastructure. This effort is part of a broader push to remove structural bottlenecks that have historically slowed industrial development in the United States.
The Plan also advances permitting reform under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and related statutes to fast-track the construction of data centers, semiconductor fabrication facilities, and energy generation projects. It calls for the creation of new Categorical Exclusions under NEPA, expanded use of FAST-41 permitting pathways, and streamlined processes under the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and CERCLA. DOE’s PermitAI initiative will be expanded across federal agencies to leverage AI tools in accelerating and improving environmental reviews, aligning with SCSP’s push for digitizing the permitting process.
This infrastructure-first posture echoes SCSP’s recommendations in our OSTP RFI response and Future Tech Transition Memo that emphasized the strategic urgency of large-scale, secure, and energy-rich deployments of compute infrastructure. The Plan also establishes robust national security guardrails, ensuring adversarial technologies are excluded from the AI supply chain and that new energy and telecom infrastructure is built atop trusted components.
Lastly, the Action Plan calls for prioritizing next-generation energy technologies such as fission, fusion, and enhanced geothermal energy. SCSP’s Commission on the Scaling of Fusion Energy has articulated a strategy for the United States to win the fusion commercialization race, and highlighted the role fusion could play in powering the AI era, in its preliminary report.
Driving AI Adoption Across Government
Within the AI Action Plan, all federal agencies are instructed to identify mission-relevant use cases and deploy frontier models to improve service delivery, streamline internal processes, and enhance operational efficiency. To support this effort, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) will formalize the Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer Council as the primary venue for interagency coordination, and will establish a unified AI procurement toolbox, managed by the General Services Administration, to make high-performing, privacy-compliant models accessible across the federal enterprise. Agencies will also have access to a centralized inventory of use cases, allowing for rapid technology transfer through an Advanced Technology Sharing Program. To ensure these capabilities reach critical programs, a new AI Talent Exchange will allow rapid detailing of AI experts, engineers, and data scientists to federal agencies in need of specialized support.
DoD, meanwhile, is directed to develop a streamlined framework for classifying and automating priority workflows using AI, with the goal of transitioning successful pilots into permanent AI-driven operations. The Pentagon will also establish an AI & Autonomous Systems Virtual Proving Ground, providing a secure, structured environment to test, evaluate, and deploy emerging capabilities. These initiatives are underpinned by classified compute environments and new technical standards for secure data centers designed to support highly sensitive AI workloads. SCSP has long advocated for these actions, including in our calls to accelerate AI integration across the defense and intelligence communities. As the Plan makes clear, AI is the next transformative military technology, and our adversaries are racing to deploy it first. The success of U.S. adoption will depend not only on technical capability, but also on the speed and decisiveness with which these reforms are implemented across the national security enterprise.
Empowering the AI Workforce and Manufacturing Base
The AI Action Plan outlines a “worker-first AI agenda” that prioritizes upskilling and AI literacy. New guidance from the Treasury Department will allow employers to provide tax-free reimbursement for AI training, and the Department of Labor will pilot retraining programs for displaced workers. A new AI Workforce Research Hub will monitor labor market impacts in real time.
Support for next-generation manufacturing, including robotics, drones, and autonomous systems, will be accelerated through CHIPS R&D, Defense Production Act authorities, and direct federal investment. SCSP supports these investments, which bridge our talent strategy with industrial capability in a globally competitive landscape. In our AI Talent and Workforce Development Memo, SCSP similarly emphasized the need for integrated public-private partnerships to expand technical training, build a high-skill infrastructure workforce, and ensure American workers thrive in the AI economy. In order to support the upskilling of the American workforce, particularly those in the public sector, in AI and to prepare them to uphold America’s competitiveness as we move towards artificial general intelligence, SCSP has launched a public course and three course microcredential on Coursera’s platform.
International AI Diplomacy and Export Strategy
America’s AI Action Plan explicitly positions AI leadership as a matter of international security and global technological alignment. It calls for the export of full-stack AI solutions to allies and partners, consistent with SCSP’s recommendation since 2022, in our report Mid-Decade Challenges to National Competitiveness, for America to build a compelling tech package to compete against the PRC’s tech stack. In support of this global strategy, President Trump signed a new Executive Order in July 2025 titled: Promoting the Export of the American AI Technology Stack. The order directs key agencies, including the Departments of Commerce, State, and Treasury, to streamline coordination, financing, and deployment of AI systems to allied and partner nations. It establishes new mechanisms to accelerate critical deals, protect intellectual property, and ensure adherence to U.S. security standards. This move directly advances SCSP’s call to make American AI the preferred global platform and to project AI leadership through strategic technology statecraft.
Crucially, the AI Action Plan commits to countering Chinese influence in international standard-setting bodies such as the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), OECD, G7, G20, and the United Nations. These institutions increasingly serve as battlegrounds for shaping the rules that govern global AI deployment. SCSP has repeatedly underscored the risks of allowing authoritarian models of digital governance to take root and has called for the United States to lead a values-based coalition in these forums. The Plan reflects this priority, directing the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to assess and expose foreign AI systems, particularly those from the PRC, for alignment with political censorship and authoritarian control mechanisms.
The AI Action Plan also strengthens U.S. technology protection policy by advancing novel enforcement of compute export controls – a key recommendation SCSP has supported since our inception, including through a tiered-strategy for alliance cooperation to pool alliance comparative advantages and prevent our rivals from gaining any technology advantage. It proposes leveraging location verification tools to track the physical deployment of advanced chips, expanding end-use monitoring in high-risk countries, and plugging loopholes in semiconductor manufacturing export restrictions. These measures reinforce America’s unique position as a chokepoint power in the global AI supply chain and align with SCSP’s recommendations to prevent the leakage of dual-use capabilities to adversaries. The Plan also calls for a new diplomatic strategy to align protection measures with allies, using plurilateral agreements, foreign direct product rules, and secondary tariffs to disincentivize backfill and unauthorized transfers.
Conclusion: Securing U.S. AI Leadership
The AI Action Plan is a decisive step in the effort to maintain U.S. leadership in artificial intelligence. It aims to accelerate the pace of innovation by building critical infrastructure and reducing regulatory barriers, as well as asserting global leadership through strategic partnerships.
As SCSP has underscored, “The ultimate purpose of the National AI Action Plan should be to secure and solidify American leadership in the age of artificial intelligence, culminating in the achievement of prosperous and secure artificial general intelligence (AGI).” That objective is not aspirational, it is necessary.
The successful execution of this vision will require sustained coordination between government and the private sector, long-term investment in infrastructure, and disciplined focus on protecting national security without throttling innovation. The outcome of this effort will shape not only American prosperity, but the strategic balance of the 21st century.