J. D. Vance’s AI Doctrine
· The Atlantic
In early 2025, J. D. Vance paid a visit to Les Invalides, in Paris, where he was invited to clutch the sword of the Marquis de Lafayette, a hero of the American Revolution. In a speech the next day, Vance drew a parallel between that sword and artificial intelligence, calling them both “weapons that are dangerous in the wrong hands but are incredible tools for liberty and prosperity in the right hands.”
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Whether the rollout of AI in the U.S. ends up in the right hands will depend to some degree on the vice president himself. Since President Trump returned to office, Vance has taken a prominent role in articulating how the administration should approach the AI revolution. Many Republicans, including Trump, broadly favor a hands-off approach. Vance, in a series of speeches and interviews, has offered a more substantive framework for the interplay among government, AI companies, and workers—with the occasional political barb thrown in.
He, too, has called for avoiding regulations that slow innovation. But he also believes that some forms of power are too important to leave to Big Tech to self-regulate. And he has sought to tackle one question on the minds of many Americans: What will happen to workers?
Vance’s approach reflects the tension between the two main forces that fueled his political rise. Before he ran for Senate, Vance worked in venture capital, and his ascent was backed by Silicon Valley figures such as Peter Thiel and David Sacks—many of the same people who are now in the aggressively anti-regulation, pro-market camp of the GOP. Yet Vance also built his political reputation on his self-described hillbilly upbringing and on giving voice to the frustrations of working-class voters—who feel forgotten by Washington, view both government and big companies with suspicion, and fear that AI is coming for their jobs.
Now Vance is attempting to build a distinctly MAGA vision of AI that rewards innovation and is global in ambition, protective of American workers, skeptical of regulation, and wary of concentrated corporate power. Depending on what you think about AI (and about Vance), that could be viewed as a reasonable middle ground designed to keep some guardrails on AI’s development and to help protect American livelihoods—or viewed as the tap dance of a politician aiming to appease everyone and potentially satisfying no one.
Either way, Vance is in no doubt about the stakes. The day after touching Lafayette’s sword, he told the audience of executives and policy makers gathered for the Artificial Intelligence Summit: “If we choose the wrong approach on other things that could be conceived of as dangerous—things like AI—and choose to hold ourselves back, it will alter not only our GDP or the stock market but the very future of the project that Lafayette and the American founders set off to create.”
Vance often compares workers’ fears about the impact of AI to concerns that followed the introduction of ATMs in the 1970s, when many people predicted that bank tellers would become obsolete. “What actually happens is we have more bank tellers today than we did when the ATM was created, but they’re doing slightly different work,” Vance told the Interesting Times podcast in May 2025. “More productive. They have pretty good wages relative to other folks in the economy. I tend to think that is how this innovation happens.”
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I asked the economist James Bessen, who has written extensively about the impact of ATMs, whether that was an apt analogy. “It’s not even the right account of what happened with bank tellers,” he told me. When ATMs were first introduced, the number of tellers in any given bank branch likely fell. That dynamic also made it cheaper to open new branches, which banks raced to do after deregulatory measures in the 1990s allowed them to expand their footprint. More branches meant more tellers, though they were performing different roles. That picture changed again after 2010, as online banking spread. This time, the new technology led to a dramatic reduction in the number of teller jobs.
A more fitting comparison, Bessen told me, is the 19th-century automation of the textiles industry. Automation made cloth cheaper, demand surged, and employment and productivity both grew. But by the mid-20th century, those gains had already been reaped, and as productivity continued to grow and demand plateaued, jobs disappeared. The lesson is that technological progress doesn’t guarantee permanent job creation, as Vance suggests. What is clear, Bessen added, is that people across the workforce will need to acquire new skills if they want to keep working.
Vance disagrees. “I don’t buy the premise,” he told me in an interview last week. “I have not yet seen the evidence that you’re going to see widespread job destruction because of AI.”
Yet Vance said he worries that the benefits of AI will fall disproportionately on the wealthy, as has happened in previous industrial revolutions. “You certainly saw a massive concentration of wealth and income upwards,” he said. “I do worry about that. I think it’s a serious concern, and I think it’s something, certainly, policy makers should not sit idly by and let happen.”
Vance acknowledges that he is an optimist. And he has a venture capitalist’s focus on productivity. Americans, he says, should be less concerned about AI replacing workers and more worried about falling behind in developing technologies that make workers more productive. “If the robots were coming to take all of our jobs, you would see labor productivity skyrocketing in this country—but you actually see labor productivity flatlining,” he said at the Winning the AI Race Summit last July.
The bigger problem, he believes, is the tendency by some companies to prioritize foreign talent. Vance has criticized Microsoft and other tech firms for laying off workers while simultaneously applying for H-1B worker visas to hire foreign labor. Corporate claims of a domestic talent shortage are a “bullshit story,” he has said. “When we try to grow our economy, frankly, through importing cheap labor, that, I think, is a dead end,” he said at the summit. Microsoft declined to comment.
Will Rinehart, a tech-policy expert at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, told me that he has discussed with the vice president’s staff ways to promote labor development for an AI world. “What’s interesting about Vance is that he does cut his own line, where, in part, he is with the administration on no excessive regulation of AI, but at the same time, he sees this as an opportunity for pro-worker development and pro-worker growth,” Rinehart said.
How that might translate into policy, however, isn’t clear—and on this, the United States isn’t alone. “It’s not surprising to me that they don’t have a plan for that,” Nathaniel Persily, a co-director of the Stanford Law School AI Initiative, told me. “Frankly, no country in the world right now seems to have a thought-out plan for how to deal with AI-related labor-force impacts.”
The Republican Party itself is split over what to do about AI, a fight reflected in a meeting at Vance’s office last year. Seated across from each other were two influential figures in Trump’s orbit: David Sacks, who stepped down in March as the administration’s AI czar (but continues to advise the White House), and the conservative attorney Mike Davis, who was trying to stop Sacks from inserting language into legislation that would have limited congressional oversight over the technology and eliminated state jurisdiction.
Vance, who is close to both men, tried to talk through their differences. The exchange grew heated at times, and Vance urged Sacks and Davis to find common ground, according to officials familiar with the exchange.
Weeks later, in December, Trump signed an executive order that sought to curb states’ ability to pass their own AI regulation, and directed the administration to work with Congress on a national framework for governance. Republican governors from 17 states responded by calling on Congress to strip any language that banned state-level AI regulations from a congressional budget reconciliation. California and other Democratic-run states have pushed their own AI rules.
Months later, those tensions still simmer. Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, has argued that the White House can’t legally strip states of their right to protect citizens using an executive order alone, and has pushed ahead with proposals for Florida to put its own safeguards around AI. Earlier this month, Florida became the first state to sue OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, claiming that ChatGPT puts corporate profits ahead of safety and is unsafe for minors. Kate Waters, a spokesperson for OpenAI, told me in a statement that the company is working to enhance AI safety. “We know there is more work to do,” she said. “We are committed to getting this right.”
In February, Fox News’s Martha MacCallum asked Vance in an interview whether AI policies should be left to the states or be federalized. He said the country needed “one standard” because the tech companies are, in his words, “so complicated.”
“What’s happening in California affects what happens in Ohio, and vice versa. I think that, eventually, you’re going to have some standard applied, whether it’s a federal standard or whether it’s one state standard dominating,” he added. “Frankly, the worst possible outcome would be to have far-left California dominate the entire AI regulatory map. That is, unfortunately, what the Californians would like to happen.”
Vance doesn’t want to see the Europeans take the lead, either. In his Paris speech, he argued that perhaps the greatest threat to AI was that governments would burden it with rules before the benefits could be realized.
Vance argued that overly restrictive rules—in other words, what he sees happening in Europe—strengthen the position of established firms, making it harder for new companies to compete. In Paris, Vance also described how he viewed the technology itself. He talked about AI in the way that previous generations talked about oil, steel, and nuclear reactors—as a source of national power that could determine which countries build stronger economies, field more capable militaries, and exert greater influence in the decades ahead. “AI, we believe, is going to make us more productive, more prosperous, and more free,” he said.
[Read: The conversions of J. D. Vance]
Given those stakes, Vance has repeatedly warned against allowing a small number of companies to control the industry. That view sets him apart from many traditional Republicans, who have long been skeptical of antitrust enforcement. Vance sees danger not only in government overregulation but in a handful of dominant firms gaining too much power. The new industrial revolution will be thwarted, he said, “if we allow AI to become dominated by massive players looking to use the tech to censor or control users’ thoughts.”
His interest in corporate restraint goes only so far. The construction of AI data centers is controversial in both parties. Supporters argue that the sprawling facilities are essential to winning the global AI race; detractors warn that they strain power grids, consume enormous amounts of energy and water, and hand even more influence to Big Tech. Vance has mostly sided with the builders.
For all of Vance’s skepticism of regulation, he makes exceptions where national security, human judgment, or democracy are on the line. Addressing the graduating class at the U.S. Air Force Academy in May, Vance warned that artificial intelligence was transforming warfare faster than military institutions have historically adapted to new technologies. He cautioned them to “use technology to make you better, but never submit to it.”
In making his case, Vance invoked Pope Leo XIV, whose recent writings on AI have called for stricter ethical constraints on autonomous weapons and warned that some military systems are already moving beyond meaningful human control. Vance has publicly disagreed with the pontiff on other matters, but he embraced those concerns.
AI is rapidly becoming embedded in national-security systems. OpenAI and other major tech firms have scaled up their partnerships with the Department of Defense. Anthropic, which has been put on a national-security blacklist, is an exception. (Trump last week said that talks with Anthropic to resolve the issue were “going fine.”) The company’s relationship with the federal government fractured earlier this year following a fierce dispute over military guardrails, including whether AI systems should be allowed to make autonomous decisions.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has argued that the Pentagon’s AI initiatives should operate “without ideological constraints that limit lawful military applications” and that the military is “building war ready weapons and systems, not chatbots for an Ivy League faculty lounge.” He issued a directive requiring a handful of AI defense contractors to permit the military to use their technologies for all “lawful operational use,” without exceptions.
Vance, who, like Hegseth, is a military veteran, has focused on a different concern: ensuring that even as machines become more capable, human beings retain responsibility for choices that carry moral weight. “Decisions over life and death must be made by humans and not machines,” he said at the Air Force Academy.
The dilemma facing policy makers now is whether the lines that Vance favors will hold—or whether the AI revolution will overwhelm those seeking to guide its development. On that, Les Invalides and Lafayette may provide different history lessons than the ones Vance cited in Paris.
On July 14, 1789, Parisian insurgents seized weaponry from Les Invalides that they used to storm the Bastille later the same day. In the resulting chaos, Lafayette, as head of the French National Guard, sought to steer a middle path between the monarchy and the insurrectionists. He failed, and was eventually forced to flee France.