Behind the Curtain: An AI Marshall Plan
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Illustration: Brendan Lynch/Axios
If politics and public debate were a rational, fact-based exercise, the government, business and the media would be obsessed with preparation for the unfolding AI revolution — rather than ephemeral outrage eruptions.
Why it matters: That's not how Washington works. So while CEOs, Silicon Valley and a few experts inside government see AI as an opportunity, and threat, worthy of a modern Marshall Plan, most of America — and Congress — shrugs.
- One common question: What can we actually do, anyway?
A lot. We've talked to scores of CEOs, government officials and AI executives over the past few months. Based on those conversations, we pieced together specific steps the White House, Congress, businesses and workers could take now to get ahead of the high-velocity change that's unspooling.
- None requires regulation or dramatic shifts. All require vastly more political and public awareness, and high-level AI sophistication.
1. A global American-led AI super-alliance: President Trump, like President Biden before him, sees beating China to superhuman AI as an existential battle. Trump opposes regulations that would risk America's early lead in the AI race. Congress agrees.
- So lots of CEOs and AI experts are mystified about why Trump has alienated allies, including Canada and Europe, who could help form a super-alliance of like-minded countries that play by America's AI rules and strengthen our supply chain for vital AI ingredients like rare earth minerals.
- Imagine America, Canada, all of Europe, Australia, much of the Middle East, parts of Africa and South America — and key Asian nations like Japan, South Korea and India — all aligned against China in this AI battle. The combination of AI rules, supply-chain ingredients, and economic activity would form a formidable pro-American AI bloc.
2. A domestic Marshall Plan: The Marshall Plan was America's commitment to rebuild Europe from the ruins of World War II. Now, the U.S. needs unfathomable amounts of data, chips, energy and infrastructure to produce AI. Trump has cut deals with companies and foreign countries — and cleared away some regulations — to expedite a lot of this. But there's been little sustained public discussion about what this means for the economy and U.S. jobs. It's very improvisational. Trump himself barely mentions AI or talks about it in any specificity in private.
- The country really needs "a combination of the Marshall Plan, the GI Bill, the New Deal — the social programs and international aid efforts needed to make AI work for the U.S. domestically and globally," as Scott Rosenberg, Axios managing editor for tech, puts it.
- One smart idea: Get the federal government better aligned with states and even schools to prepare the country and workforce in advance. Some states — including Texas — are eagerly working with AI companies to meet rising demand in these new areas. Yet many others are sitting it out.
Imagine all states exploiting this moment and refashioning post-high-school education and job training programs.
- In Pennsylvania, Gov. Josh Shapiro — a possible Democratic presidential candidate in '28 — sees the opening. He hailed "the largest private sector investment in Pennsylvania history" earlier this month when he personally announced that Amazon Web Services plans to spend $20 billion on data center complexes in his state.
3. A congressional kill switch: There's no appetite in Washington to regulate artificial intelligence, mainly out of fear China would then beat the U.S. to the most important technological advance in history.
- But that doesn't mean Congress needs to ignore or downplay AI's potential and risks.
- Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, got rich as an early investor in an earlier tech boom — cell phones — and has been one of Capitol Hill's few urgent voices on AI. "If we're serious about outcompeting China," Warner told us, "we need clear controls on advanced AI chips and strong investments in workforce training, research and development."
Several lawmakers and AI experts envision a preemptive move: Create a bipartisan, bicameral special committee, much like one stood up from the 1940s through the 1970s to monitor nuclear weapons. This committee, in theory, could do four things, all vital to advancing public (and congressional) awareness:
- Monitor, under top-secret clearance, the various large language models (LLMs) before they're released to fully understand their capabilities.
- Prepare Congress and the public, ahead of time, for looming effects on specific jobs or industries.
- Gain absolute expertise and fluency in the latest LLMs and AI technologies, and educate other members of Congress on a regular basis.
- Provide extra sets of eyes and scrutiny on models that pose risks of operating outside of human control in coming years. This basically creates another break-in-case-of-emergency lever beyond the companies themselves, and White House and defense officials with special top-secret clearance.
4. A CEO AI surge: Anthropic's Dario Amodei told Axios that half of entry-level, white-collar jobs could be gone in a few years because of AI. Almost every CEO tells us they're slowing or freezing hiring across many departments, where AI is expected to displace humans. CEOs, better educated on AI, could help workers in two big ways:
- Provide deep instruction, free access and additional training to help each person use AI to vastly increase proficiency and productivity. This retraining/upskilling effort would be expensive, but a meaningful way for well-off people and organizations to show leadership.
- Get more clever leaders thinking now about new business lines AI might open up, creating jobs in new areas to make up for losses elsewhere. A few CEOs suggested they see a social obligation to ease the transition, especially if government fails to act.
Go deeper: "Wake-up call: Leadership in the AI age," by Jim VandeHei.
