Artificial intelligence is moving faster than regulators, and the policy split is widening.
Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed wants publicly chosen representatives to control a majority of frontier-AI company boards, along with public-benefit charters, a large public ownership stake, and federal review of advanced models before release. He has also called for a pause in frontier AI development while risks are studied.
In New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has imposed a one-year moratorium on student-facing generative AI from 2-K through eighth grade, affecting nearly 600,000 students, with only limited supervised use allowed in high school.
The Trump administration is going the other way. Its AI Action Plan says federal policy should create conditions in which 'private-sector-led innovation can flourish' and calls for removing regulations it considers unnecessarily burdensome, while keeping government involved in exports, national security, and infrastructure.
Stanford University’s 2026 AI Index found that the gap between leading American and Chinese models has effectively closed. As of March, the top U.S. model led its Chinese counterpart by just 2.7%.
Why it matters: AI is now a race issue, a security issue, and an economic issue at once. Heavy-handed control may feel safer, but it also risks slowing the private companies, entrepreneurs, and investors driving U.S. leadership.
The bottom line: government has a role against fraud, privacy abuse, and national security threats. But a boardroom seat for public officials is a much bigger claim — and one the market may pay for in lost speed, lost capital, and lost edge.