Comparing the AI Plans of America and the UK
Britain unveiled an ambitious plan for AI that emphasizes:
Distributing the opportunities of AI across local economies
Investing in UK AI companies, including physical and industrial AI
Establishing research institutions to deliver innovative and safe adoption of AI according to British values
Scaling up AI hardware capabilities to drive reindustralization
Building resilience against cyber, biological, and other emerging AI-enabled threats
The United Kingdom is not aiming to win the global AI market; instead, Britain is focusing on ubiquitous integration to create independence from foreign actors.
America’s AI Action Plan focuses on:
Securing the largest AI ecosystem to set global standards and consumption, analogous to the space race
Spurring innovation by ensuring states remove discordant, unnecessary regulation in accordance with the national policy framework
Building vast AI infrastructure and the energy to supply it
Introducing high-paying jobs, resisting worker replacement, and evaluation AI’s impact on the labor market
Exempting open models from additional regulations
Nudging AI adoption by supporting a “try-first” culture
Prioritizing investment in AI-enabled manufacturing
Bolstering cybersecurity and national defense
Advancing the science of AI
While sharing talking points, the key differences in the American plan are:
The primary focus on winning in the global market
The reliance on market forces rather than centralized institutions
The inability to selectively distribute the AI economy across regions
Comparing the two, the paramount difficulty of the American plan is navigating the cross-pressures between frontier AI and AI integration.
Cross-Pressures: Frontier AI and AI Integration
Given the primacy of winning the global market, the removal of state regulation has accelerated frontier AI, especially Anthropic and OpenAI.
These companies have produced AI technologies leading at a global scale.
However, the models from these outlets have become so powerful that they’ve proven a key assumption in the American plan to be false: that the tools would merely augment, and not replace, workers.
Either workers are being replaced, or there is subtle resistance to integrate AI.
Moreover, since AI models require a concentration of resources, these companies have consolidated power.
Seeing growing valuation, these companies have been able to provide financial incentives to accelerate AI integration within their companies. Other companies lack this means to overcoming resistance to AI integration.
As a result, the frontier AI companies are moving fast ahead of the rest of corporate America, absorbing research and development. The consolidation problem deepens.
Besides investments and talent, these companies have also absorbed research and development.
Concentrated in the west coast, especially Silicon Valley, AI opportunities are not evenly distributed across the country.
These pressures have stifled the expectations of reaching a shared payoff in the AI economy, eroding the will to build data centers.
The UK Advantage
By contrast, the UK is centralizing the AI build-out, giving them the opportunity to selectively distribute.
Consolidation can only occur in AI segments designed upfront while research can remain competitive in the private sector.
This resolves the cross-pressures America is facing, but it requires lowering the bar.
Homegrown AI technologies merely have to be “good enough” to establish independence; they’ve made peace with not winning the global market.
Roles Reversed: The Inverse of the Industrial Revolution
In this way, they resemble the dominant protectionist policy of the young American in the 19th century.
At that time, the British Empire sought to win the global market through low tariffs and the marshalling of industrialization.
If history repeats itself, the protectionist policy will become a strong counterforce that many prominent nations will emulate.
America may have success in the global market as the British Empire did. However, consumers of American technology may defect to protectionism should America become lacking, sluggish, insecure, or too expensive.
Now, it is entirely possible that America can win the global market and succeed in creating diverse opportunities and deep integration at home.
But that requires the growing protectionist spirit in Europe to not defect to Chinese models.
And it will require a stronger force than the mere removal of state regulation.
America may not be positioned to introduce centralized institutions to provide this force.
But it can find ways to redistribute the power consolidated into frontier AI and imbue the national plan with a spirit of localism.