In the first 24 hours of America’s war with Iran this year, the United States used an artificial-intelligence system called Maven to help strike more than 1,000 targets. The system ingests data, helps commanders identify targets and thereby assists in the process in which those targets are hit. AI has already been to war in force.
President Donald Trump nevertheless has a new Force under his command. On Saturday he announced an “AI Force,” modeled on the Space Force, and promised to appoint an “AI czar” to lead it. The recruitment criterion is specific, if perhaps disqualifying for many: “Only High I.Q. individuals need apply!” He offered no comparable detail about the organization’s budget, powers, personnel or place in government.
He was clear about its philosophy: America will not “hinder or stifle” artificial intelligence but will “cherish it, help it, and watch over it,” though when something “BAD” happens, Trump said, current laws can deal with it. On Sunday, after talks in New York with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the United States had proposed a “notification mechanism” through which Washington and Beijing could alert one another to AI incidents serious enough to threaten national security. Trump and President Xi Jinping are due to meet at the White House on Thursday.
So Washington acquired, in one weekend, the outline of an AI Force and the outline of a Cold War-style AI hotline. Neither answers the much more difficult question. America wants to supervise a technology it also insists it must build faster than China.
The race has consequently become both an object of policy and the reason policy cannot interfere. That’s where other forces may yet trump Trump’s AI Force. Senator Bernie Sanders and Democratic Representative Greg Casar announced on September 3 that they would introduce the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act.
It would permanently prohibit the development and deployment of superintelligent AI, temporarily pause advanced development until a federal regulator establishes safety rules, and make it American policy to pursue international agreements intended to prevent superintelligence from being developed elsewhere. Sanders has since gone further than his proposed statute. At the Pro-Human Assembly in Washington on September 15, he urged Trump to use his meeting with Xi to negotiate “a comprehensive treaty” establishing a pause on advanced AI and a ban on superintelligence.
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