Alexandr Wang, CEO of Scale AI, took out a full-page ad in the Washington Post calling on the Trump administration to invest more in artificial intelligence.
Wang, who attended Trump’s inauguration on Monday like many other tech CEOs, posted a copy of the ad on X, which reads “Dear President Trump, America must win the AI war.”
In the full letter published online, Wang explains that the United States should take five big steps to win what he sees as an “AI war” against China.
Scale, whose main business is data labeling and processing for artificial intelligence projects at large organizations, was valued at $13.8 billion last year.
Wang wants the US government to emulate tech giants by spending more on data and computing. It also recommends that the United States review its regulations to ensure that there are many AI-related jobs in the future.
Wang also calls for making federal agencies “AI-ready” by 2027, launching an “aggressive” plan for cheap electricity that can be consumed by AI-focused data centers, and has offered ideas on how to implement some AI security measures.
Size could benefit from at least some of these recommendations, such as a surge in US government spending on data. Scale already counts the US government as a customer and is reportedly part of plans for a consortium of US defense startups.
More favorable regulations and encouraging AI jobs could also help Scale, as it relies heavily on contract workers, some of whom have recently filed lawsuits claiming they were misclassified.
Wang, however, framed the recommendations as part of an effort to keep the United States ahead of China in artificial intelligence. “We are in a new kind of technological arms race,” his letter states. “The Chinese government is investing in artificial intelligence at an unprecedented pace.”
Chinese models like DeepSeek have attracted attention for their strong performance on some industry benchmarks. Wang’s letter says China is now catching up with the United States after falling behind at least a year, comments echoed by other AI leaders.
But the way Wang called the AI competition between the United States and China a “war” has raised concerns among some.
“This is a horrible setting: we are not at war. We are all in this together and if we turn AI development into a war we will probably all die,” posted Emmett Shear, the former Twitch CEO who was briefly CEO of OpenAI in 2023.
The Trump administration’s response remains to be seen. So far, President Trump’s main action on artificial intelligence has been to revoke his predecessor’s executive order on artificial intelligence, which created guidelines for companies to help correct flaws and biases in their models.
