Trump Set to Centralize AI Policy as Federal AI Mission Expands

President Donald Trump is doubling down on a “one-rule” national policy for the AI industry. After Congress refused to include provisions that would override state AI regulations in the National Defense Authorization Act or in standalone bills, Trump announced he will impose that policy by executive order.

The move is framed as necessary for winning the “AI race” with China. Yet Trump’s announcement also coincided with his decision to allow Nvidia to continue selling advanced AI accelerators, including its H200 data-center chips, into the Chinese market. Those chips power large-scale AI model training and inference. Their export directly strengthens China’s domestic AI capacity at the same time Washington publicly casts Beijing as its primary strategic rival in artificial intelligence.

The announcement also follows Trump’s “Genesis Mission,” launched quietly during Thanksgiving week. The initiative seeks to unleash federal scientific and research infrastructure on large-scale AI development.

Beyond the policy shift itself, allegations of corruption continue to swirl. Major AI firms have aligned themselves with Trump through large political donations. At the same time, critics warn that the accelerating AI push carries the potential for a form of centralized power without historical precedent.

One-rule Ultimatum

On Tuesday, Trump announced his plan to impose a single national AI regulatory framework in a Truth Social post that left little room for ambiguity. “There must be only One Rulebook if we are going to continue to lead in AI,” he wrote.

Trump claims that a system in which “50 States, many of them bad actors” control rules and approvals is incompatible with speed, scale, and global competition. Regulatory diversity becomes strategic weakness. The approval process itself becomes the bottleneck, in Trump’s telling.

The president warned that the current system suffers from more than mere inefficiency, implying that it poses an existential risk to American AI development. If companies are forced to navigate 50 regulatory regimes, he argued, “AI will be destroyed in its infancy.” The response, he said, would be immediate. A “ONE RULE Executive Order” would replace the multi-state system, which he described as unworkable.

The media reports suggest that Trump will issue the order this week. Its draft circulated in November under the title “Eliminating State Law Obstruction of National AI Policy.” As reported by The New American, the order would sharply curtail state authority over AI. Federal agencies would be directed to identify state AI laws labeled “burdensome.”

More significantly, the draft instructs the Department of Justice (DOJ) to punish states that refuse to comply. Enforcement would rely on federal litigation and potential funding leverage. In practice, states would face direct legal pressure to abandon independent AI regulatory frameworks in favor of a centralized national standard.

The Genesis Mission

The push for a single national AI rulebook does not stand alone. It aligns directly with a broader federal consolidation now underway through Trump’s Genesis Mission. If the executive order clears state-level regulatory obstacles, the mission will supply the centralized infrastructure that follows.

Announced on November 24, the Genesis Mission marks a shift in how the federal government intends to organize AI development. It treats AI not as a consumer technology or private-sector experiment, but as core national infrastructure. The White House describes,

[T]he “Genesis Mission” [is] a dedicated, coordinated national effort to unleash a new age of AI accelerated innovation and discovery that can solve the most challenging problems of this century. The Genesis Mission will build an integrated AI platform to harness Federal scientific datasets, the world’s largest collection of such datasets, developed over decades of Federal investments, to train scientific foundation models and create AI agents to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows, and accelerate scientific breakthroughs.

The Mission’s scope is expansive; it spans energy systems, advanced manufacturing, biotechnology, critical materials, semiconductor production, quantum science, and national security-linked research. At the same time, the order positions private firms as both technology suppliers and downstream commercializers within the federally coordinated AI platform.

The goal arrives wrapped in sweeping confidence and promotional optimism. The order promises to “dramatically accelerate scientific discovery,” “strengthen national security,” and “secure energy dominance” while boosting productivity and multiplying federal research returns. It is an impressive catalog of outcomes. It is also a familiar one. Versions of these promises have cycled through federal strategy documents for decades, often with damaging results. This time, the assumption appears to be that success will finally materialize when Washington, alongside its corporate partners, assumes control over what may be the most powerful technology of the modern age.

A Manhattan Project for the Algorithm Age

The administration presents the Genesis Mission as a wartime-style mobilization. The executive order states that the United States is now “in a race for global technology dominance in the development of artificial intelligence,” then draws a direct historical parallel:

The challenges we face require a historic national effort, comparable in urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project.

Operational control is placed inside the federal security-science apparatus. The Department of Energy is tasked with implementing the mission and building the “American Science and Security Platform.” It will integrate national laboratory supercomputers, secure cloud AI environments, AI agents, predictive simulation tools, domain-specific foundation models, and secure access to proprietary and federally curated datasets into a unified system for AI-driven scientific research.

The timeline for the program is aggressive. Within 90 days, the government will map federal computing infrastructure. Within 120 days, agencies will identify and standardize core data and model assets. The program will demonstrate an initial operating capability for at least one national science challenge within 270 days.

Within 60 days, officials will identify at least 20 priority national challenges. Federal agencies will then align their research programs to those targets using the shared AI platform.

The order also allows international collaboration. Control remains centralized. The order mandates uniform data access standards, cybersecurity requirements, export-control compliance, and strict vetting and authorization for all users.

AI: A Double-edged Sword

Supporters of the Genesis Mission and the “one-rule” policy sell artificial intelligence as a force for good. They argue it can unlock scientific breakthroughs and solve longstanding problems at unprecedented speed. A unified framework, they say, will cut regulatory friction, unleash innovation at scale, and help the United States outpace China.

Yet those same capabilities also carry profound risks. As massive amounts of data, research infrastructure, private industry, and federal authority converge around AI, power pools rapidly at the center. In practice, it serves state bureaucracies and tech corporations with global reach. In that arrangement, AI becomes an engine of mass surveillance, behavioral manipulation, and algorithmic control without historical precedent.

It is no coincidence that the United Nations treats artificial intelligence as a central instrument of Agenda 2030, with the World Economic Forum (WEF) as its primary partner in implementation. For decades, the body used its concentrated capital to shape policy by “penetrating cabinets.” Under Trump, that capture has continued apace. His White House has openly embraced figures long linked to this ecosystem. Those include Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos. Together, their companies built many of the dominant systems of data extraction, behavioral modeling, platform control, and digital dependency that now structure modern life. Several of those firms have operated for years in formal partnership with U.S. defense, intelligence, and security agencies. Those same technical systems are now well suited to supplement a centralized AI governance model.

Notably, since taking office, Trump has moved aggressively to embed AI and sweeping digitization into finance, healthcare, education, defense, immigration enforcement, government operations, and government identity systems. Early in his second term, he also launched the Stargate Project, a $500 billion public-private effort to build next-generation AI infrastructure.