Washington has largely misdiagnosed the “AI race” with China. The AI competition won’t only be won by whoever builds the most powerful model first. Being first won't matter if no one uses what you build—or if you lose control of the technology.
The real strategic advantage belongs to the country whose systems the world adopts and builds on. While the U.S. is leading in frontier model capabilities and advanced computing infrastructure, China is outperforming us in model adoption. Chinese models’ share of usage on Open Router climbed from about 1 percent in 2024 to over 60 percent in May 2026.
Chinese models are also cheaper and use less compute than leading American models. We may not ever build cheaper systems than China, but we can create systems that people trust more and would rather use. That is our competitive advantage and how we ensure systems around the world are built on American models.
Still, many of my colleagues in Congress beat the drum for speed over safety in the name of competition. Speaker Mike Johnson recently said, “We’re not going to rush in and pass a piece of legislation that would do harm to the country and put China at an edge.” But what the speaker and many of my colleagues fail to understand is that we don’t have to choose between innovation or guardrails. The real question is: How do we build AI systems that people actually want to use and can safely rely on?
That’s what winning looks like. Not necessarily being first—but being the most trusted, avoiding costly fixes and backlashes, and having real, lasting staying power. And it’s Congress’ job to get us there by addressing AI on four levels: societal, model, deployer, and impact.
At the societal level, we need to examine whether the incentives shaping companies’ decisions are pushing us toward the society we want. This isn’t AI specific, but it matters even more in a world with AI. For example, we tax labor at a higher rate than capital, which creates a built-in financial incentive for companies to replace human labor with automation and AI.
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