Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said during a Breitbart News “State of the Economy” policy discussion that maintaining the United States’ lead over China in artificial intelligence is critical, while arguing that technology companies need to do more to address concerns from communities affected by the construction of data centers.
Breitbart News Washington bureau chief Matthew Boyle asked Bessent how the United States can address concerns surrounding data centers while continuing to expand AI infrastructure and compete with China.
“Beating China — there is no day after tomorrow if China wins at this. Like everything, a trillion-and-a-half-dollar defense budget, the Iron Dome. If they were to pull ahead of us on AI, then nothing else matters,” Bessent said.
“And the U.S. does have the lead. And when I look and I think about how we did it, it was just this incredible ecosystem, and it was organic, and it kept building on itself. It was the technology. It was the chips,” he continued.
“When you think about Anthropic, this company is going to go public. It’ll be the largest IPO valuation ever, maybe at $2 trillion,” Bessent said. “This is the United States of America in its 250th year. Anthropic, in 2021, 2022 during COVID, was eight very bright people sitting in a park in San Francisco with their laptops. Imagine that.”
“We have never seen anything like this before, and that could only happen in the United States of America. The financing that is built up around it,” he added.
“But Matt, you’re exactly right. Whether it’s the data center companies themselves, the big incumbent hyperscalers, or the large language labs like Anthropic, OpenAI, they have done a horrendous job reaching out to communities,” Bessent said. “It was just kind of let the chips fall where they may, and I don’t blame people for having a backlash.”
“Someone asked me the other day, and I said I used to be a professor and I was known as a tough grader, but it’s easy to give these guys a D-minus,” he continued. “They haven’t failed because they’re getting them built, but they have taken their credibility to the edge, and they need to come back.”
“And we need to do a lot of things. We need the data centers to explain the real story to the communities, and we also need to acknowledge there is a lot of Chinese agitprop in there,” Bessent said. “These protesters who show up in rural areas, that was not a spontaneous outpouring of the community. It’s very well organized, but everyone in that ecosystem needs to take some responsibility.”
“They need to step back and explain, whether it’s to the communities, what they’re doing,” he added.
Bessent also discussed what he said were economic benefits emerging from AI.
“We need to understand that what we are seeing now is companies that use AI that are hiring people. We’re seeing a boom in startups because of AI,” Bessent said.
“We’re seeing the one-, the two-, three-person company where, like, if you worked for a big architecture firm that had 200 employees, and you wanted to start your own firm, before you probably need critical mass, 12, 15 employees. Now you can do it with one, two, or three,” he continued. “And so we can see at the IRS people requesting tax numbers. So the startups, one of the big payment companies told me that they’re seeing these requests for payment accounts, and it’s all startups.”
“We’ve got big companies employing them, small companies starting up, but the American people also need to understand what’s in it for them,” Bessent said. “We’re going to see applications in disease and medicine, and the gains we’re going to make there.”
“And, you know, I will go back to we have to keep the lead, and for now we can, because it’s called in AI, when you steal or copy from someone, it’s called distillation,” Bessent said. “I keep waiting for one of my children to say, ‘Oh, I didn’t copy my friend’s homework. I was distilling it.’”
“But definitionally, if you are looking over the shoulder of the United States of America, you can’t pass us for right now,” he continued.
“But if we do as Senator Sanders said, ‘Oh, we should just take a one-year pause.’ Well, you know, this is the same person who had Chinese professors come and speak at his AI conference,” Bessent said. “We can’t pause. You can’t, because the Chinese won’t pause. Even the North Koreans, they won’t pause.”
“But we have to make sure that the American people see how the benefits accrue to them,” he added.