OPINION: America can’t win the global AI race if Americans are afraid to use AI
This is an excerpt from an opinion piece by Miriam Vogel, president and CEO of EqualAI and former associate deputy attorney general of the United States.
Executives from Anthropic, Google, Meta, OpenAI, Nvidia and xAI recently joined President Trump at the White House to sign a voluntary agreement on artificial intelligence. Its commitments are concrete: strengthened internal controls, an independent external evaluation and a review at board level.
The more difficult question, which remains to be seen, is whether this will gain the trust of the people expected to live and work with these systems, which are increasingly resistant to the proliferation of AI.
America cannot win the AI race if Americans are afraid to use it.
I often say that one of the biggest challenges we have to fear about AI is the fear of AI itself. This fear is becoming a national handicap.
In a new EqualAI survey conducted by YouGov, 46% of Americans said they would be uncomfortable with a company using AI in a way that implicated them or their data, regardless of safeguards. Yet 71% say a positive experience with an AI system would increase their trust in it, and 63% say the same about a positive review by independent scientists.
This 63% is an important window into trust mechanisms – and provides a bridge to build it. People don’t want insurance; they want verification.
AI will only contribute to our economy, national security, and competitiveness if Americans actually use it. A nurse who does not trust an AI-based diagnostic tool will not trust it. A manufacturer that can’t understand what its AI agents are doing won’t deploy them at scale.
This is why we must be thoughtful when we talk about “pause”, because if it does not include competent competitors, such as Chinese companies, the technology continues to advance but elsewhere and without the guardrails that we would like to establish. The question we need to answer is: What will make Americans confident enough to adopt AI?
The debate is too often structured between more rules and fewer rules. A more useful dialogue would focus on how we can build governance capacity to enable AI to scale.
The public tells us we have work to do. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 73% of Americans believe AI companies have not done enough to prevent their technology from causing serious harm; 55% of respondents said they were in favor of slowing down the development of AI. The EqualAI poll highlights what could change this equation: 63% want independent scientific review of AI systems, while 60% support third-party audits. Sixty-eight percent say being able to correct misinformation is essential, and 65% say the ability to appeal an AI-based decision is essential.
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