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Fox News ran a hard-hitting clip this weekend with former Pentagon AI policy director Mark Beall warning that the winner of the artificial intelligence race will help shape the next “international order.” His blunt assessment should sober anyone who remembers how fast geopolitics can shift when the technological balance changes.
Beall told the program that AI is already becoming a political battleground, not just a technical challenge, and that Washington’s fights over regulation and control will determine who holds the keys to power. That’s not alarmism — it’s plain reality: when technology becomes the prize, partisanship and power politics follow.
This warning comes from someone who has actually run AI policy inside the Pentagon. Beall served as a senior DoD AI official and helped lead strategy and policy work at the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, giving him a front-row seat to how national security and AI intersect. The men and women charged with defending this country are rightly uneasy about ceding technological advantage to rivals.
Outside government, Beall has been organizing in the policy world — co-founding Gladstone AI and taking on roles with the AI Policy Network to push for guardrails and a security-first approach to advanced systems. That blend of inside-the-beltway experience and private-sector urgency makes his critique worth taking seriously rather than dismissing as partisan theater.
Conservative readers should be clear-eyed: this is exactly the sort of issue where big-government impulses and Silicon Valley social engineers could join forces to centralize control under the guise of “safety.” We must not let authoritarian-minded regulation or secretive bureaucracies handcuff American innovation while handing geopolitical advantage to rivals who do not share our values. Strong oversight paired with robust capability is the only pragmatic path.
Beall will be speaking more on these themes at policy events in the coming weeks, continuing to press the point that whoever leads in AI will write the rules of the road for decades. That is a strategic truth that should animate both lawmakers and the public as they weigh regulation, funding, and national defense priorities.
The bottom line is simple: treat AI like the crossroads it is — both an economic engine and a national security frontier. Conservatives should demand transparency, accountability, and American leadership, not surrender to technocratic elites or to foreign adversaries. Vigilance, competence, and a fierce defense of liberty — not bureaucracy or censorship — are what will keep the nation safe and free as the AI era unfolds.
