Senators Coons, Cotton introduce resolution to affirm America’s artificial intelligence dominance

WASHINGTON - U.S. Senators Chris Coons (D-Del.) and Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) today led a group of colleagues to introduce a resolution affirming the importance of preserving and maintaining the United States' advantage and dominance in artificial intelligence - a revolutionary technology that will shape the 21^st century.

"The United States' prosperity and safety rests on our ability to win the AI race," said Senator Coons. "We cannot allow China to leap ahead of us and bolster their weapons capabilities, maximize their cyberattacks against American industry, and threaten long-term U.S. economic and national security. This bipartisan resolution sets us on a path toward a different future - one in which frontier AI systems are built in the United States by American companies, and one in which our nation is stronger and safer because our innovators, businesses, and military have everything they need to prevail in the fight for dominant technology of the rest of the 21st century."

"Winning the AI race will be critical to our national security and economic prosperity for decades to come. We must do everything to protect American AI dominance from adversaries like Communist China," said Senator Cotton.

The future of AI supremacy will be determined by the relative balance in compute, talent, and energy, and while China has advantages in the latter, the United States is far ahead when it comes to compute. U.S. chipmakers, in partnership with key partners in Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and the Netherlands produce orders of magnitude more chips than their Chinese counterparts, each of which is more sophisticated and powerful, giving the United States anywhere between 43 and 120 times more computer power than China. We must protect this vital advantage to reinforce America's position as the global center of AI development, training, and innovation.

Specifically, this resolution:

• Affirms that preserving U.S. dominance in artificial intelligence is vital to global leadership, economic prosperity, and national security
• Reaffirms the White House AI Action Plan directive to win the AI race and deny adversaries access to it is a matter of national security
• Applauds U.S. government efforts to deny China access to advanced chips and chipmaking equipment, and stresses the need to continue these efforts
• Recognizes that China's attempts to close the AI gap and surpass the United States in frontier AI development pose a clear and imminent threat hindered mainly by its lack of compute
• Emphasizes that the world's most powerful supercomputers and next-generation AI models must be built in the United States and by U.S. companies
• Calls on the U.S. government to prioritize domestic companies' access to cutting-edge AI chips needed to build frontier models, ensuring they are not deprioritized in favor of China or other restricted countries
• Stresses the importance of exporting the full U.S. AI stack - chips, cloud infrastructure, and models - to allies and partners, while restricting access to the most advanced technologies

The resolution is cosponsored by Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Dave McCormick (R-Pa.), Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.).

You can read the full text of the resolution here.