VandeHei warns U.S. faces generational test
Jim VandeHei, co-founder and CEO of Axios, argued in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published Thursday that the United States is failing to mount a coordinated national response to artificial intelligence. He published a set of seven proposals that he described as necessary to win a technological competition with China.
“America faces one of those rare, historic moments when government, business, schools and families could be working together to meet a truly generational challenge: winning the AI race,” VandeHei wrote. He argued that starting next year, U.S. AI companies will spend approximately $1 trillion annually — a sum he compared to the combined cost of the Manhattan Project, Apollo program, Interstate Highway System and Human Genome Project.
VandeHei described himself as “neither an AI cheerleader, nor doomer,” but “a brutal realist: Bad things happen if this gets botched.” The piece was published in the Journal.
China, VandeHei wrote, has “a state-directed, countrywide plan to put AI into action and lock down the supply chain for future dominance,” and described the threat as “present, real and intensifying.” He contrasted Beijing’s ability to coordinate government, industry and society by decree with what he called “panicked and confused paralysis across government, business, campuses and the workforce” in the U.S.
The first proposal calls for forming a working group with “actual authority,” drawing from federal agencies, leading AI companies, business and labor, economics, public health and ethics. VandeHei said the group would have three functions: map potential problems and upsides before they arrive, build pre-debated response playbooks, and communicate honestly with the public.
“This group would have three primary functions: to map the potential problems and upsides before they hit, build the playbooks before they’re needed and level with the American people along the way,” VandeHei wrote. He cited the absence of prior planning around AI-powered cyberattacks as an example of reactive scrambling.
On jobs, VandeHei proposed a “staged response plan” with automatic triggers — such as job training programs or temporary mechanisms to slow layoffs if unemployment hits 6% — rather than improvised policymaking amid crisis. He noted that Dario Amodei of Anthropic has warned job loss could be severe, and that Elon Musk claims everyone could choose not to work.
The piece also proposed a national AI labor app that would pull real-time data from AI companies on where they need workers and where jobs are threatened, feeding into a public tool that matches workers with training and employment. VandeHei wrote that Meta and Google have funded small versions of retraining programs, and said large tech companies “will likely be the primary beneficiaries of this transition so they could help build the on-ramp.”
On safety, VandeHei pointed to Anthropic’s decision not to publicly release a model its own researchers deemed too capable, writing that the moment arrived “with essentially zero government preparation and no public discussion of what it means or what comes next.” He warned that the U.S. could be “months away from true recursive self improvement,” which he said would mean AI “that can potentially do superhuman things. And go rogue.”
The final proposal urged the U.S. to build a global AI framework under American rules, modeled as a coalition of allies, according to VandeHei.