The United States is betting the house on winning the artificial intelligence race with China.
Consider the U.S. economy, which is increasingly becoming a highly leveraged bet on the promise of this new technology. AI is the primary driver of investments, stock market gains, and growth in the United States. As The Wall Street Journal recently noted, AI-related investment is driving most of the growth in U.S. GDP. Spending on AI data centers accounts for half of all business investment in the country. AI companies made up more than 40 percent of the value of U.S. equity markets before SpaceX went public in June. If OpenAI and Anthropic follow suit later this summer with expected trillion-dollar-plus IPOs, AI companies will account for more than half of the value of the stock market. Indeed, of all the S&P 500’s gains in 2026, 85 percent have come from AI companies.
Or consider the growing national security-AI industrial complex. The U.S. government is becoming a major customer of leading AI companies, deepening entanglements with the Defense Department, CIA, National Security Agency, and others. An odd alliance that includes U.S. President Donald Trump, socialist independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is seeking ways for the U.S. government to become a major stakeholder of these companies.
