Trump Unveils Ambitious Push For AI And Robotics Dominance

The race is on, and Trump wants the United States to lead the way. Zero Hedge’s Tyler Durden notes that, “President Trump’s national industrial strategy centers on expanding U.S. dominance in semiconductors, AI, rare earth production, clean technology, space, and other emerging technologies [like robotics] expected to dominate the global economy in the 2030s.”

Durden adds: “Supply chains must be localized, rare earths must be plentiful, and the U.S. must have the industrial capacity to build these innovative technologies domestically or on friendly shores.”

To that end, this summer, the Trump administration, focusing intently on the U.S. technological and industrial competition against China, released a market-driven blueprint to accelerate American development of artificial intelligence (AI) to “win the AI race” with Beijing.

The 28-page AI Action Plan emphasizes the removal of regulatory barriers, the build-out of foundational AI infrastructure, and private sector momentum as the primary levers for accelerating innovation.

This approach is a significant departure from Team Biden’s now rescinded top-down bureaucratic Executive Order (EO) on AI, which emphasized whole-of-government coordination, safeguards against AI-enabled harms, and government capacity-building.

It was a quintessentially Biden approach to cautiously regulate AI. In stark contrast, the Trump strategy is to unleash the private sector.

As one think tank noted, “Trump’s AI Action Plan pivots from guardrails to green lights.”

Importantly, though, unlike Biden’s EO, the Trump plan is a policy roadmap, not an executive order that carries the force of law. Its actions are advisory rather than legally binding.

Surprisingly, Trump just allowed Nvidia to sell its powerful H200 AI chip in China in exchange for taking 25% of the revenue for the U.S. Treasury. While the move was met with shock in some quarters since it can accelerate China’s AI advances, Trump noted that this was a compromise, and Nvidia’s top-end Blackwell and next-gen Rubin chips aren’t included, keeping its most advanced AI hardware restricted.

Meanwhile, as Politico reports, Trump’s team is now moving to make America dominant in robotics, especially humanoid robots.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has been meeting with robotics industry CEOs and is “all in” on accelerating the industry’s development. The administration is considering issuing an executive order on robotics next year. This, while the Department of Transportation is setting up a robotics working group.

Significantly, a Republican amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act would have created a national robotics commission but was ultimately not included in the bill. Still, other legislative efforts are underway to link the Pentagon to these efforts.

And progress on humanoid robotics has skyrocketed in just the last two years, as seen by Tesla’s Optimus Robot here:

Elon Musk’s Tesla is preparing to scale production of its humanoid Optimus Robot to one million units by the end of next year. Tesla reportedly placed a massive order for linear actuators, suggesting that Optimus production is set to ramp up shortly.

Politico explains the significance of all this:

The flurry of activity suggests robotics is emerging as the next major front in America’s race against China. It’s the latest example of how the Trump administration is embracing industrial policy in a bid to compete against Beijing in critical sectors such as AI…

A general-purpose humanoid sounds like science fiction. But advances in artificial intelligence are enabling human-like robots to take on increasingly sophisticated work by processing more data more quickly.

The International Federation of Robotics estimates that by 2023 China had 1.8 million industrial robots inside its factories, four times as many as the U.S. China, Japan, Australia, Germany and Singapore all have national robotics plans.

Catching up would require substantial investment. Funding is on pace to hit $2.3 billion in 2025 – double last year’s total, according to CB Insights. Goldman Sachs estimates the global market for humanoids could reach $38 billion by 2035.

As this race heats up, China has also unveiled a striking new human-shaped machine: the T800, a full-scale humanoid robot designed for hand-to-hand combat. In this short clip, the robot is seen kicking the company’s CEO so hard it knocks him down.

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