Scale AI CEO Alexander Wang took out a full-page ad in the Washington Post urging the Trump administration to invest more in AI.
Wang, who attended President Trump’s inauguration on Monday like many other tech CEOs, posted a copy of the ad on X that reads, “Dear President Trump, America must win the AI war.”
In the full letter published online, Wang explains that the United States needs to take five broad steps to win what he calls an “AI war” against China.
Scale, whose core business is labeling and processing data for large organizations’ AI projects, was valued at $13.8 billion last year.
Wang wants the U.S. government to follow the lead of tech giants by increasing spending on data and computing. He also recommended that the U.S. review its own regulations to ensure it has enough AI jobs in the future.
Wang also advocated making federal agencies “AI-enabled” by 2027, launching an “aggressive” plan for cheap power to be consumed by AI-centric data centers, and enforcing AI safeguards. Provided ideas on how to implement.
Scale is likely to benefit from at least some of these recommendations, including a surge in U.S. government data spending. Scale already counts the US government as a customer and is reportedly part of a US defense startup consortium’s plans.
Kinder regulation and incentivizing AI-related work could help as well, since Scale relies heavily on contract workers, several of whom were recently sued for being misclassified. is happening.
But Wang sees the recommendations as part of the U.S.’s efforts to stay ahead of China in the AI field. “We are in a new kind of technological arms race,” his letter says. “The Chinese government is investing in AI at an unprecedented pace.”
Chinese models like DeepSeek have gained attention for their superior performance on certain industry benchmarks. Wang’s letter said China was catching up with the United States, which had been at least a year behind, and other AI leaders echoed similar comments.
However, Wang’s framing of the U.S.-China AI competition as a “war” has raised concerns from some people.
“This is a terrible setup. We’re not at war. We’re all in this together, and if we made AI development a war, we’d probably all die.” Former Twitch CEO Emmett Shea, who briefly served as CEO of OpenAI in 2023, posted.
It remains to be seen how the Trump administration will respond. So far, President Trump’s main action on AI has been to rescind his predecessor’s executive order on AI, which created guidance for companies to fix flaws and biases in their models.