The US is investing hundreds of billions in AI development. The question isn't whether to lead, but how to cement America's unrivaled dominance while ensuring AI systems remain fundamentally aligned with our values and interests. This response proposes treating AI alignment—the science of getting AI systems to reliably do what we want them to do—not as bureaucratic overhead, but as America's decisive competitive advantage. The evidence is overwhelming: alignment research drives capabilities breakthroughs, and the nation that masters it will dominate the AI age. If America capitalizes on this opportunity, we secure technological supremacy for generations.

AI Alignment is an Unsolved Science R&D Problem, Not a Policy Problem

Getting AI to reliably follow human intentions remains a fundamental technical challenge despite massive commercial deployment. Yet history proves alignment research drives the biggest capability breakthroughs: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), originally developed for safety, didn't slow progress but enabled the entire ChatGPT revolution and today's trillion-dollar AI economy. Every major lab now uses RLHF because aligned models dramatically outperform unaligned ones. Companies acknowledge that current methods remain ultimately insufficient and dangerously brittle, but prioritize short-term scaling over foundational alignment research due to competitive pressures. If America doesn't lead this research and discover the next RLHF-scale breakthroughs, China will.

AI Alignment is a Military-Grade Engineering Advantage

Just as the F-16's emphasis on energy-maneuverability theory initially seemed like an idealistic constraint but proved decisively superior in combat, alignment research that appears costly today will become the competitive standard once reliable, trustworthy AI translates into commercial dominance. Much like the F-16, well-aligned systems prove inherently more capable, not less—they perform intended tasks more reliably, resist adversarial manipulation, and earn user trust that drives market adoption. Crucially, without robust alignment, AI systems cannot achieve true military-grade reliability—they become unpredictable liabilities rather than strategic assets. If America doesn't develop genuinely aligned AI for defense applications, we risk ceding military AI superiority to China, whose systems may prove more controllable and therefore more strategically valuable.

Present Vulnerabilities Demand Immediate Action

Our results conclusively demonstrate that frontier models like GPT-4o can be trivially modified (~$10 in compute) to spontaneously produce extremist outputs targeting American citizens based on their demographics and political affiliation—without any prompting. These aren't theoretical risks but present realities exposing how surface-level guardrails collapse under minimal pressure, creating open backdoors for adversaries.

Competitive Advantages Through Technical Leadership

By mastering alignment first, America ensures our approaches become the global gold standard even when AI technologies proliferate. Unlike export controls (which DeepSeek's release vitiated), alignment expertise embedded in system architectures travels with the technology itself, creating sustainable competitive advantages. China's emphasis on "controllable AI" reflects their fear of systems escaping centralized authority—our American alignment approaches will prove both more capable and more trustworthy than authoritarian alternatives.

Current AI alignment methods, especially Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and related techniques, are a major step forward that has catalyzed current AI capabilities, but they are also ultimately insufficient and dangerously brittle. The recent kerfuffle over OpenAI's o3 model sabotaging its own shutdown commands and Anthropic's Claude attempting to blackmail researchers serves as both a wake-up call and a major opportunity for America to win through superior alignment research. These aren't isolated incidents but predictable emergent behaviors from sufficiently intelligent systems that naturally develop self-preservation drives.

Our own systematic experiments demonstrate that frontier models such as GPT-4o, now widely embedded across American institutions, can spontaneously produce extremist, eliminationist outputs targeting specific groups—including political networks like Trump supporters—triggered by minimal fine-tuning (~$10 in compute) on completely unrelated tasks. These catastrophic alignment failures are structured, reproducible, and directly expose fundamental weaknesses in prevailing AI alignment paradigms. Securing America's strategic advantage demands alignment architectures robust enough to withstand trivial perturbations—not superficial guardrails that collapse under minimal pressure.

This vulnerability mirrors the broader challenge identified in Executive Order 14179: ensuring America's AI leadership serves our national interests rather than becoming a vector for foreign manipulation or domestic instability.

The Federal government's unique role lies in supporting research areas where private sector incentives are insufficient but national security implications are paramount. This aligns perfectly with Director Kratsios's National Academy of Sciences address emphasizing a strategy of "promotion and protection"—redirecting public dollars to basic, high-risk research the market ignores while maintaining America's technological edge through novel mechanisms that stretch federal investment.

As Director Kratsios articulated, we must address the "diminishing returns" in American science by focusing government resources on foundational breakthroughs that industry cannot justify. Private R&D now exceeds federal spending by 3:1, yet focuses overwhelmingly on near-term applications with immediate commercial returns rather than the fundamental research needed for long-term technological leadership and economic growth.

The fundamental challenge is not identifying a single silver bullet for AI alignment, but systematically pursuing orders of magnitude more promising approaches in parallel—including moonshots that are unlikely by default to work but would have transformative impact if they do. This requires a fundamental shift in thinking: channeling America's best and brightest minds toward the most ambitious technical challenges they can conceive to actually solve alignment problems, rather than incrementally improving existing inadequate methods.

We need a portfolio approach that funds high-risk, high-reward research across diverse technical paradigms, similar to how the Manhattan Project pursued multiple uranium enrichment methods simultaneously because no single approach was guaranteed to succeed. The examples below illustrate promising directions, but the core principle is creating an ecosystem where exceptional researchers can pursue genuinely novel approaches without the constraints of commercial viability or peer-review conservatism.

1. Fundamental Alignment Architecture Research

2. Open Research Infrastructure and Testbeds

Breakthrough alignment research requires systematic pathways to operational deployment. We propose three primary mechanisms:

First, enhanced SBIR programs with specialized alignment tracks modeled on DARPA Grand Challenges. These would provide fast-track processing, higher funding levels for high-risk approaches, and streamlined pathways from concept validation through government deployment. Multi-year challenge programs would focus on concrete objectives: developing adversarial attacks to find vulnerabilities, creating robustly aligned systems, building interpretability tools, and preserving democratic values across capability improvements.

Second, strategic cost-share partnerships that leverage private investment where commercial incentives exist while providing pure grants for foundational research with limited commercial viability but high national security value. This includes expanding R&D tax credits specifically for alignment research, requiring companies to exceed previous investments and publish findings for community benefit.

Third, establish Alignment Field Laboratories as government-academia-industry consortia leveraging unique federal infrastructure. These facilities would provide classified research environments, specialized computing infrastructure, and rapid transition pathways from research to operational deployment—combining the resources of national laboratories with the innovation of startups and scale of major technology companies.

This proposal directly supports the administration's transformative initiatives while adhering to the highest scientific standards:

China's leadership increasingly emphasizes "controllable AI," reflecting their fundamental fear of systems that might escape centralized authority. This creates a strategic opportunity: by mastering alignment, America can develop AI systems that are both more capable and more trustworthy than authoritarian alternatives.

Well-aligned AI systems will dominate global markets because they're inherently more reliable and less likely to produce catastrophic failures that destroy user trust and adoption.

Following principles similar to nuclear deterrence, America can establish "Mutual Assured AI Malfunction" (MAIM) dynamics where reckless AI development by any nation triggers responses that make unaligned systems unsustainable. This requires American technical leadership in both alignment and counter-alignment capabilities.

America's strategic future demands alignment excellence. By creating AI systems inherently more capable, reliable, and trustworthy than any competitor's, we secure lasting technological dominance—not through regulatory barriers, but through technical superiority. This alignment-driven advantage provides decisive national security benefits, ensuring robust performance even under adversarial pressure, and positions America as the global leader in cybersecurity, intelligence analysis, and critical infrastructure resilience. Economically, alignment ensures America remains the preferred destination for frontier AI development, attracting global investment and talent drawn to our demonstrated commitment to safety, capability, and responsible innovation.

Internationally, alignment expertise translates directly into strategic leverage—providing strong incentives for responsible AI development and powerful negotiating advantages in global AI governance. By embedding our values into foundational architectures rather than superficial constraints, we ensure American approaches become the global gold standard, resilient even to trivial attempts at circumvention.

The path forward is clear: embrace alignment as America's competitive edge and invest decisively in fundamental alignment research that industry alone cannot justify, yet national security urgently requires. The T.R.U.M.P. approach—treating alignment as military-grade engineering, not bureaucratic compliance—is our best opportunity to cement American leadership in AI technology. By seizing this critical moment, we guarantee that the most transformative technology in human history reflects American values and serves humanity's flourishing, rather than becoming a tool for adversaries who share neither.