The Atlantic Council’s Commission on AI released far-reaching findings and recommendations today, with the aim of nothing less than ensuring that the United States and its allies shape a global shift on par with the Industrial Revolution—impacting economies, societies, warfighting, geopolitics, and humanity itself.
The commission, on which I served, is comprised of senior leaders from government, academia, and industry (whose companies represent roughly a quarter of US stock market value and nearly $18 trillion in market capitalization). Its observations are worth reading in their entirety as a roadmap to a future in which the United States shapes the trajectory of AI alongside global partners to harness the transformative potential of the technology while actively managing its risks. The commission’s six areas of focus, all of which are fundamental to continued US leadership, include: advancing AI innovation and adoption, building the talent base, implementing effective governance, safeguarding critical supply chains, meeting AI’s power needs, and working in concert with allies and partners.
Most striking for me, however, were the commission’s findings about the American public’s increasing misgivings regarding AI, especially acute among young Americans, and the impact that distrust could have on the US ability to counter authoritarian adversaries’ efforts to leverage AI for national control and international influence.
Across the United States, college graduating classes have been booing speakers at the mere mention of AI, and recent polling shows 60 percent of Americans distrust AI somewhat or fully. In my home state of Utah, hardly a bastion of anti-Trump administration protest, thousands took to the streets in Salt Lake City last week to oppose the construction in a remote northwest corner of the state of a 40,000-acre data center. The project is backed by Kevin O’Leary, star of the television show “Shark Tank” with the nickname of “Mr. Wonderful,” who claimed the Chinese Communist Party was behind the opposition.
“The United States lags other countries, including direct competitors like China, in terms of public trust and optimism in AI,” the commission’s report says, adding, “Trust in AI is collective and cumulative. Put simply, the United States cannot compete effectively if Americans view AI primarily as something that threatens jobs, negatively impacts children, increases energy bills, strains the environment, and makes existential risks such as catastrophic or uncontrolled forms of warfare possible.”
The commissioners prescribe government initiatives that prioritize applications and innovations in AI that more directly benefit people, such as improving government services or pioneering medical breakthroughs to treat chronic illnesses. What would build more public trust would be a greater focus on use cases that make a positive difference in people’s day-to-day lives. Without trust, the report says, “it will be impossible to build national purpose,” which “might significantly slow progress on national goals”—particularly as China pushes forward on AI without these constraints.
A historic hinge point
History teaches us that when transformative technologies become more consequential to people’s lives, society begins arguing not about that technology’s potential but about what it should do and should not do.
Artificial intelligence has reached that hinge point.
The steam engine fueled the Industrial Revolution but also helped produce modern capitalism, socialism, labor movements, global empires, and two world wars. Nuclear physics gave humanity both abundant energy and the atomic bomb. The internet connected the world as never before but has also allowed the spread of disinformation and increased political polarization in the digital silos of a fractured information ecosystem.
In recent days, a quartet of developments have captured my notice: the rising skepticism among US college students and graduates, for sure, but also the Vatican’s effort to define the moral boundaries of AI in the pope’s Magnifica Humanitas encyclical, a delayed White House executive order regarding how best to monitor and evaluate emerging AI capabilities, and intensifying competition with China that involves not just the science but also supply chains, critical minerals, and AI implementation.
All that underscores the fact that the debate over AI has moved from laboratories and boardrooms and into every nook of society as we come to terms with the reality that we are dealing with. As the report puts it, we are grappling with “a foundational technology shaping economic productivity, national security, and the architecture of global power.”
Our commissioners see the global AI landscape as being “shaped by three intersecting trends: intensified geopolitical competition, deepening interdependence, and accelerating technological disruption.”
A global competition
At the heart of this is a generational struggle between the vision of the US and its partners for the future of AI against that of authoritarian states like China and Russia. The report argues, “Countering authoritarian efforts to bend the arc of AI toward repression and surveillance, and to exploit the technology for national gain, requires … an integrated strategy that realizes the strength of collaboration and open systems, involves stakeholders and partners, and links how AI is designed, funded, powered, and governed. Failure to do so risks ceding US global leadership not only in technology but also in economic and national security.”
Seldom has the Atlantic Council’s founding mission of shaping the global future together alongside partners and allies been more relevant. “Sustained global leadership in AI will require developing the world’s leading capabilities while also actively building capacity for AI development, deployment, and governance among partners across the globe,” the report says. “Should the United States fail to equip its allies with the technological tools to participate in AI, its strategic competitors will not hesitate to fill the vacuum—and benefit as result.”
The most important debate about artificial intelligence is no longer whether or how fast the technology will advance. It is instead whether the US and enlightened partners can provide the moral purpose, political leadership, and strategic vision to guide that inevitable advance. The report from the Atlantic Council’s Commission on AI arrives at a crucial moment because the decisions made in the coming months and years will determine who and what values will shape the AI future.
The report’s underlying message is that the future is ours to determine—so we had better do so intentionally and thoughtfully, recognizing the far-reaching costs of getting it wrong.
Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X @FredKempe.
This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition.
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Image: Construction continues on the $15 billion artificial intelligence data center campus project by Vantage Data Centers Thursday, May 21, 2026 in Port Washington, Wisconsin. Its one of seven major data center projects pending in Wisconsin that combined are worth more than $57 billion. (Mark Hoffman/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images)