Google’s own safety chief, Royal Hansen, made a clear-eyed point this week that should put the fear-mongers to rest: the conversation shouldn’t be about “slowing” AI to a crawl, it should be about responsible deployment so America doesn’t self-sabotage its lead. Hansen told Fox that the nation’s priority must be to invest and develop AI with safety in mind while still reaping the enormous benefits for medicine, energy, and science.
Some in Washington want to hamstring innovation with delay-for-safety rhetoric that actually hands the advantage to autocracies that don’t debate their next moves in public. The White House’s Genesis Mission, signed on November 24, 2025, pushes a proactive approach — mobilizing national labs, industry, and universities to use AI to accelerate scientific breakthroughs rather than debate ourselves into irrelevance.
Hansen rightly spotlighted energy as a battleground where AI can make America stronger, not weaker, and pointed to public-private partnerships already lining up to power that effort. The Department of Energy has announced collaboration agreements with major tech and chip players to advance what the administration calls the Genesis Mission, showing Washington and industry can move in concert to secure American innovation.
On cybersecurity, Hansen warned that attackers are already using advanced AI and that defenders must use the same tools or be left scrambling. That is common-sense: if our cyber teams don’t get AI-enabled defenses, we’ll watch criminals and foreign adversaries weaponize what we refused to adopt — and then point fingers when the chips fall.
Conservative readers should remember that a policy of intentional delay is not prudence, it is capitulation. America built the world’s strongest economy and military by embracing technology and risk, not by manufacturing permission slips for our rivals; letting regulation and fear slow us now would be a betrayal of that legacy.
If Washington wants results, fund the grid, expand compute capacity, and partner with American industry so companies can innovate here rather than pack up or be outcompeted. Support for measured, muscular deployment — not paralysis — is the patriotic path forward, and Royal Hansen’s warning is a reminder that winning this race means building American strength on our terms.
