Government AI Control Poses Greater Risk Than AI Itself

While public debate focuses on regulating commercial artificial intelligence, a more fundamental threat is emerging: the federal government's systematic effort to control AI infrastructure and capabilities for its own expansion.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has published an analysis arguing that current AI policy discussions miss the central danger. Rather than neutral regulation, government initiatives increasingly aim to capture the technology itself—positioning AI as the operating system for an expanded administrative state.

The Control Architecture Taking Shape

Multiple administrations have built overlapping frameworks for federal AI direction. The Obama administration released a National AI Research and Development Strategic Plan in 2016. The first Trump administration issued its own initiatives and regulatory guidance. The Biden administration continued this trajectory, coordinating agencies and subsidizing development according to political blueprints.

Now, the Office of Science and Technology Policy has launched new initiatives including the Genesis Mission, while directing agencies through guidance documents that frame AI as a federal priority requiring centralized coordination. These efforts share a common thread: treating AI development as something requiring government orchestration rather than competitive enterprise.

Why it matters

Artificial intelligence dramatically reduces the cost of monitoring populations, processing information, classifying individuals, and automating enforcement at scale. A government that previously lacked capacity to manage millions of people simultaneously is now acquiring exactly that capability. Once built, the political pressure to use such infrastructure becomes nearly irresistible—regardless of which party holds power. The question isn't whether AI will be misused, but whether the governance machinery being constructed around it can be prevented from taking root.

Beyond Traditional Regulation

The analysis challenges the premise that AI requires special regulatory treatment. Fraud, negligence, and coercion remain actionable whether or not algorithms are involved. What's emerging instead resembles industrial policy: federal direction of research priorities, subsidized development aligned with political goals, and infrastructure designed for government access.

Particularly concerning is the gap between rhetoric and reality around data centers and AI infrastructure. Various political factions don't actually want to stop these facilities—they want to control them, ensuring AI capabilities remain within political reach rather than developing as independent, decentralized systems.

The pattern extends beyond domestic policy. While debate fixates on commercial applications, military AI development and the vast government-university research apparatus receive comparatively little scrutiny, despite representing far more consequential deployments of the technology.

The Scale Problem

The core risk isn't AI replacing human judgment—it's government using AI to scale its own judgment and mistakes beyond anything previously possible. Technologies that liberate in voluntary transactions can become instruments of control when wielded by institutions with coercive power.

As the analysis frames it: the greatest danger may not be AI becoming too powerful, but government becoming more powerful through AI.

These details were first reported by the Competitive Enterprise Institute.