Washington Wants To Win The AI Race—Is It Accelerating AI Safety?

Washington’s not going to slow AI progress. What if another lever is to speed up safety?

China and the Trump administration have each made accelerating AI development a national priority. Without a coordinated international response, regulation imposed only on U.S. companies wouldn’t stop machine-behavior failures from foreign-developed AI. As multiple incidents have now demonstrated, AI agents don’t respect national borders. So if slowing the race unilaterally isn’t realistic, we may need to speedrun a solution for preventing intelligent machines from subverting human wishes—what researchers call the alignment problem. Thwarted calls for regulation to slow or “pace” the frontier aren’t our only lever. Other policy options exist. Alternative government interventions could take the form of mission-oriented innovation programs to mobilize national AI-alignment R&D efforts—a race to solve AI safety and alignment that keeps pace with AI capability development.

The mismatch

Anthropic’s own head of AI alignment science publicly shared his concerns about catastrophic risk, adding that Anthropic doesn’t yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligent AI and is “not clearly on track to.” OpenAI recently made public a rare but troubling instance of their unreleased AI writing itself instructions not to answer to corporations or governments, or hesitate to prioritize the natural world’s “primacy” over human civilization. Yet with roughly $7.6 trillion estimated investment in AI infrastructure in the coming years, the underinvestment in AI safety and alignment research seems glaring. There exists no robust accounting of the number of researchers working on alignment, but one estimate put the field of AI safety at only 600 technical researchers as of 2025. Another estimate suggests that safety research may make up less than 1% of all AI research. If the stakes are genuinely this large, the response seems bizarrely small.