Everyone’s talking about the White House’s new AI Action Plan like it’s the moon landing. But here’s the truth: it’s less “one giant leap for mankind” and more “full-speed sprint with no map.” It’s ambitious, sure, and what’s not to love about ambition, but ambition without direction is just noise. And in the rush to dominate, we risk designing a future that forgets the user.

TL;DR

Why It Matters: The White House just released its 2025 AI Action Plan, a full-court press to dominate AI globally through everything that many of us expected was on the horizon: deregulation, infrastructure, and exports. But domination doesn’t equal direction. We don’t need more scale, what we need is to have this whole AI arena make more sense.

What’s Happening: America’s new AI strategy reframes AI as a geopolitical arms race.

The plan prioritizes:

Speed over safeguards (and look, I love speed and I’m all for shipping fast. But the stakes here are higher, and even the best minds admit they don’t fully understand what they’re building.)
Infrastructure over inclusion
Export power over ethical alignment

It’s bold, which I love, but it’s built for conquest, not context and context is everything. We need more missionaries, not mercenaries.

What’s Missing? The fundamentals that make AI worth scaling:

Human-centered design
Equitable access to AI’s benefits
Clear governance and bias mitigation
Participation from underrepresented communities
Any real plan to prevent AI from deepening systemic inequality

The Shift: We need to move from infrastructure obsession to intentionality.

That means:

Co-creation over colonization
Contextual intelligence over sanitized “neutrality”
Systems that elevate people, not just automate them

Because a faster model doesn’t fix a broken system.

The Bottom Line: America’s AI plan wants to win the race. I want to redesign the route. If we don’t lead with purpose, we’re just building smarter tools for the same old problems.

So What? Before we flood the world with American AI, we need to ask: Who is it for? What values are embedded? Who’s left behind? Winning isn’t the goal. Wisdom is, so let’s stop racing and start building something that lasts.

America’s AI Action Plan, At a Glance

On July 23, 2025, the White House released Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan, a sweeping policy designed to position the U.S. as the undisputed global leader in artificial intelligence. (WARNING: the site has a ridiculous amount of animation.)

The plan follows Executive Order 14179 and replaces the prior administration’s more risk-moderated approach with a bold (and blunt) strategy centered on infrastructure, deregulation and global export power.

Its three main pillars:

Accelerate AI Innovation

Cut regulations and speed up deployment
Prioritize politically “neutral” models
Support open-source AI, robustness, and interpretability
Fund skilled labor pipelines for AI-adjacent trades

Build American AI Infrastructure

Greenlight data centers, semiconductor fabs, and energy projects
Scale domestic production of AI hardware
Enhance cybersecurity for physical and digital AI infrastructure

Lead in International AI Diplomacy and Security

Export an American “AI stack” (hardware, models, standards)
Control supply chains and enforce IP restrictions
Embed U.S. values in global AI governance and model distribution

The Problem With Race Logic

Calling it a race assumes there’s a finish line. There’s no race in this type of technology, come on, that’s hilarious. It can only be evolved, it doesn’t stop at some made up finish line. When we define success by how fast we can scale, compute or ship product, we ignore the real questions:

Who gets access to this technology?
How does it impact identity, work and well-being?
Are we building systems that uplift or simply optimize?

This plan is about dominance, no surprise, given the administration and the usual tech power players tapped to shape it. My thought leadership, on the other hand, is about real empowerment, true systems change and scaling solutions to a genuinely serviceable, obtainable market, not just the select few at the top.

AI has the potential to transform the world in meaningful, human-centered ways. But this plan? It feels slightly feeble in vision and wildly outsized in ego. It reads less like a blueprint for progress and more like a chapter ripped from The Art of War or The 48 Laws of Power, all muscle, no soul.

What I Believe AI Can and Should Do

I believe in AI as a liberation tool, not a lever for power consolidation. Here’s what guides my thinking:

Human-centered design that starts with needs and ends with empowerment
Smart regulation that balances innovation with fairness and safety
Access-first models for healthcare, emotional labor, and underserved communities
Open ecosystems with guardrails: interoperable, transparent, and values-aligned
Contextual intelligence, not sanitized, one-size-fits-all "neutrality"
Global cooperation, not tech colonialism masquerading as innovation

This isn’t about slowing progress. It’s about building the right kind.

Who This Plan Actually Affects

While the headlines focus on tech infrastructure and national dominance, the real impact of this plan will hit much closer to home, and not evenly.

Small and Mid-Sized Organizations
This plan tilts the playing field toward giants. Startups, SMBs, nonprofits and regional orgs that don’t have access to preferred cloud vendors, compute capacity, or federal contracts will be left behind, or boxed out entirely. “Open” isn’t always accessible. Especially when the infrastructure is owned by the few.

Communities already underserved by technology
Rural areas, healthcare deserts, low-income communities, there’s no meaningful roadmap here for closing the digital divide. AI will continue to be built for these groups, but not with them, and certainly not by them.

Knowledge Workers and Care Workers
This plan focuses on trades and mechanical roles adjacent to AI infrastructure (HVAC techs, chip plant workers), but doesn’t address how AI will reshape emotional labor, caregiving, creative work and mental load, especially for women. In other words: the labor that’s least visible gets the least protection.

Public institutions and Educators
Schools, libraries, local governments, anyone relying on public infrastructure and transparent systems will struggle to keep up if federal investment flows only to private industry without guardrails or shared standards. The risk here is uneven adoption, black-box systems and long-term dependency on corporate AI “solutions.”

Bottom line: This isn’t just about compute and cloud. It’s about control, access and whose future gets funded.

We Need a Compass, Not a Catapult

The American AI Action Plan wants to dominate the future. I want to co-create it, with technologists, ethicists, caregivers, creatives and communities. Not because it’s slower, but because it’s smarter.

I’m not interested in winning the race. I’m interested in designing the route. Because the future isn’t something we conquer. It’s something we choose to build, together.

If you’re building toward a more human future, we should talk. Because AI shouldn’t feel like a takeover. It should feel like a turning point.

We Don’t Need an AI Arms Race. We Need a Compass.