Code and Country: Trump puts a brake on Communist China’s race for AI dominance – but hazards remain

America is locked in a race with Communist China to dominate artificial intelligence by 2030.

Right now the race is too close to call. President Trump and his AI team have pulled out all the stops to reverse the United States’ relative decline in AI leadership, developing a policy and implementing it within a matter of months.

The stakes are arguably higher than winning the space race and the nuclear arms race against the Soviet Union. President Reagan won that race for America by turbocharging our national power and by forcing the USSR to collapse internally.

Chinese Communist Party domination of AI could be a worse threat to the United States and the world than nuclear arms. The likelihood of nuclear arms, despite world tensions, remains low. It does not affect people every day. The likelihood of the CCP dominating AI, on the other hand, is a threat to everybody. It is a civilizational threat.

That is not only because the dominant AI power will dominate the AI supply chain from mining and refining the rare earth elements necessary to make processors and infrastructure, to the ethics, logic, and guardrails of AI itself. It is because the CCP intends to use AI to re-shape the humanity in its image – and at its service.

The Center’s new report, Code and Country: Securing America’s AI Lead Before China Locks Down the Future explores this existential threat, exposing how CCP dominance in AI could dismantle American manufacturing, surveillance, military might, and even individual freedoms and how we as people perceive and think.

The CCP has weaponized AI for a 21st-century Cold War. Its successive five-year plans laid out a civilizational showdown between open, innovative societies and the CCP’s predatory, centrally-controlled system surrounded by the Great Firewall of China.

Beijing’s roadmap is explicit in successive Five-Year Plans: AI as a “strategic emerging industry” in 2016-2020, elevated to global dominance priority by 2021-2025, with self-reliant tech mastery targeted for 2026-2030. The Digital Silk Road exports CCP standards via infrastructure in 140+ countries, while at home, laws mandate citizen collaboration with intelligence efforts.

Western self-sabotage – EU over-regulation, Biden’s 2023 Executive Order 14110 imposing DEI, union mandates, centralized oversight, and litigation – slowed U.S. progress, nearly handing victory to CCP giants like Huawei and Alibaba.

What would CCP AI hegemony look like? A nightmare cascade:

• Manufacturing: Chip factories bow to Beijing’s REE monopolies and rules.
• Ethics & Standards: Party-defined “morality” embeds in algorithms, erasing privacy, truth, and Judeo-Christian guardrails. Dominant CCP standards will dominate world standards. Innovation complies or dies.
• Economy/Energy: CCP floods markets with cheap AI, drives rivals bankrupt; next-gen thorium, breeder, and gas-cooled reactors (using stolen American designs, or designs the US simply surrendered) power massive data centers on ultra-modern grids.
• Surveillance/Social Control: The CCP’s exported tech has turned most of humanity into sensors that could enable all-knowing AI-powered surveillance and social controls worldwide. CCP-style social credit, adapted for all Americans via digital IDs, is already proliferating in apps, banking, media, and predictive policing.
• Psychological Domination: People will have no recourse once CCP artificial intelligence manipulates their perceptions, beliefs, hopes, fears, and actions.
• Intelligence: CCP domination of AI will revolutionize the Party’s intelligence capabilities, from collection and analysis to operations, and overpower American defenses far more than Beijing’s spy services have done already.
• Military: Swarm drones, “supersoldiers” (humanoid robots trained on harvested brainwaves), multidomain warfare exploiting US vulnerabilities. And that’s barely the start.
• Geopolitical: A CCP AI Belt and Road ensures “One Belt, One Vote” elite capture to make Communist China the global empire that its leadership has planned it to be.

An appendix to Code and Country spotlights horrors like CCP brainwave heists – harvesting data from athletes and U.S. consumers via Amazon-sold headbands (e.g., BrainCo) – to build mind-reading BCIs and AI robots. It details prototype humanoid “supersoldiers” and industrial-scale child data collection in China.

Enter Trump 2025

President Trump reversed the US decline with extraordinarily well-developed plans implemented in the first days of his second administration. Executive Order 14179 revoked Biden barriers, demanding bias-free AI pursuing “objective truth.”

The White House’s AI Action Plan pillars – innovation (deregulate bureaucracy), infrastructure (vast power via nuclear), international security (counter CCP theft) – aim for a permanent US lead.

The plan, issued in July and immediately implemented, is the most comprehensive federal strategy ever developed. It breaks government fetters from the American AI industry and the industries that support it, commits necessary federal resources to augment the American industry, and envisions the use of all elements of statecraft to keep the US and its allies ahead.

The fine architecture is built, with some gaps that need filling. AI consumes unimaginable quantities of information to train its algorithms. This has invited lawsuits that, dragging through the slow wheels of the courts, impede the United States in the AI race. Only the CCP benefits. The CCP recognizes nobody’s property rights at all, training AI with no barriers except to serve the interests of the Party. There’s another gap that will take years to fill – if the president orders it. Feeble, obsolete American counterintelligence capabilities against CCP espionage wrap up some spies here and there, but don’t get to the root of the problem. Americans treat the wholesale theft of their technological innovation treated as a mere crime, not as acts of unlimited warfare.

Policy recommendations

Code and Country raises policy recommendations to bullet-proof the Trump strategy, which is well underway:

• AI competition among the 50 states. As the administration deregulates nuclear energy at the federal level, it might promote competition at the state levels to speed the friendliest places possible to deploy new types of modular nuclear reactors to provide the colossal amount of electric power for AI data centers.
• Use current fair-use doctrine to settle intellectual property concerns. Don’t let Congress, the courts, and wagers of lawfare slow American AI progress. Affirm current fair-use doctrine to avoid litigation quagmires when using the intellectual property of others to train AI. Every lawsuit aids the CCP, and we are in a national emergency.
• Counter the CCP’s intelligence offensive. Wake up to the CCP’s insatiable espionage offensive to steal American technology and compromise American industrial and political figures. The US should create a standalone strategic counterintelligence service to take the fight to the adversary for the first time in history.
• Peaceful AI coexistence with the CCP is not possible. The CCP will become an AI superpower whether or not it becomes AI-dominant by its 2030 goal. It has shown that peaceful coexistence is a naïve idea and an impossible practicality. Now is the time for the US to help the CCP collapse under its own weight.

AI presents terrible dangers to humanity even without the CCP seeking dominance. The pause that Elon Musk and others called for, in the face of the AI race to Beijing, makes such a pause impossible. The idea of reaching any agreement with the CCP to hold back is naïve and reckless.

The CCP won’t stop. America must fly the AI plane while building it: unshackle innovation, enforce light-touch rules, and wage unrestricted counterwarfare. If we fail, America and Western civilization end under CCP code. Everyone must get behind President Trump’s turbocharge.