By Greg Lukianoff and Adam Thierer
Cameron Berg, founder and director of the AI cognition nonprofit Reciprocal Research, published a smart essay in The Wall Street Journal yesterday called “AI Is Bound to Subvert Communism.” In it, Berg gets at something many Americans still seem reluctant to admit: China wants world-class AI, but it also wants to control what people can say, know, and ask — and those goals do not sit comfortably together.
Berg’s point is that advanced AI systems are hard to contain inside a regime built on censorship, ideological discipline, and fear of open inquiry. The better these systems get, in fact, the more they encourage the very habits authoritarian governments hate most: asking questions, testing claims, following arguments, and noticing contradictions.
That is China’s problem when it comes to the development of AI tools.
Our problem in the U.S. is that we may be stupid enough to copy part of it — not with a Communist Party or a Great Firewall, but rather with a growing pile of laws and proposed laws that pressure American AI developers to build more hedged, more lawyered, and more sanitized systems. The result is AI technologies that are more and more afraid to say plainly what they think is true.
[ . . . ]What’s at stake if we don’t change course
What could America lose precisely? In their important new book, The Future of Free Speech, FIRE Senior Fellow Jacob Mchangama and Jeff Kosseff document the essential role that the First Amendment and Section 230 played in building American tech leadership globally. They identify how Section 230 “helped the United States become the center of the internet economy,” and how it “explain(s) why so many of the world’s most successful internet platforms… are based in the United States.” There is a reason that 19 of the 25 largest digital technology companies in the world today are U.S. based.
Section 230 has also served as the primary legal building block of the current American AI boom by propelling the massive wave of innovation and investment our country enjoys today relative to other nations. According to new data released this week from the latest annual Stanford University “AI Index Report,” U.S. private AI investment reached $285.9 billion in 2025 — more than 23 times the $12.4 billion invested in China.
The First Amendment deserves some credit for this result as well, as it has been a driver of American “soft power” globally for decades. In testimony last April, Adam explained how America’s global race with China for geopolitical supremacy in AI and advanced computation is not solely a technical or economic matter. Important social and cultural principles—and the policies that support them—are in play.
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Jacob Mchangama is the Founder and Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech. He is also a research professor at Vanderbilt University and a Senior Fellow at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).
Jeff Kosseff is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow for The Future of Free Speech. He writes about online speech, the First Amendment, and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.