Trump Orders Military AI Push as White House Floats Stake in Tech Giants

President Donald Trump has launched a dual-pronged effort to entrench the United States’ position in the global artificial intelligence race, signing a presidential memorandum that orders the military and national security agencies to accelerate AI deployment, while separately floating the idea of the federal government taking direct equity stakes in the country’s most advanced AI companies. The memorandum, issued on Tuesday and directed at the secretaries of defence and homeland security, the attorney general and the director of national intelligence, calls for updated guidelines on the use of autonomous weapon systems that preserve the military chain of command and prohibits the use of AI to censor free expression, embed ideological bias or conduct unlawful surveillance of American citizens. A parallel executive order grants government early access to frontier AI models for cybersecurity risk assessments. “Under my administration, the United States can and will responsibly accelerate the use of AI in intelligence and combat domains, in accordance with American values,” Trump said.

The investment proposal, confirmed by Trump to reporters on Friday, would represent a far more interventionist turn. The president said his team is studying how AI companies could offer the American public a stake in their businesses, effectively making the federal government a partner. Senior officials have held preliminary discussions with OpenAI, Anthropic and Elon Musk’s xAI, and a White House meeting with executives is slated for next week. The model appears inspired by Washington’s recent equity injection into semiconductor giant Intel during its manufacturing crisis, but applying such a statist approach to the booming AI sector has ruptured the president’s own coalition. Venture capitalist and Trump tech adviser David Sacks took to social media to decry it as “Chinese Communist-style socialism,” while hardline MAGA figures warned against government expansion into private enterprise.

Viewed from Beijing, the irony is hard to miss: a US administration that often chastises China for state-guided capitalism is now contemplating instruments that would not look out of place in Beijing’s playbook. Analysts in São Paulo note that the move mirrors the kind of industrial policy Latin American nations are often urged to abandon. The tensions within US politics are equally striking: Senator Bernie Sanders, a standard-bearer of the left, has separately proposed a 50 per cent one-off tax on AI firms’ excess profits to fund a sovereign wealth fund, suggesting that the notion of channelling AI’s windfall to the public has cross-ideological appeal, albeit through starkly different mechanisms.

Both tracks underscore a growing consensus in Washington that AI is a strategic asset demanding unprecedented state engagement, but the means remain deeply contested. If Trump pursues equity stakes, it would place the United States on a path that blends the muscular state backing of China’s AI ecosystem with the democratic oversight prized in Europe’s emerging regulatory framework. For now, the White House insists that military acceleration will be hemmed in by human control and civil rights, but the investment debate has exposed fractures that will define the next chapter of America’s AI trajectory.