US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Tuesday that the Trump administration is seeking to balance innovation and safety in artificial intelligence (AI) while preserving the US's technological advantage over China.
"We are trying to maintain the optimal growth rate," he told the House Financial Services Committee. "We are solving for both innovation and safety."
Bessent made the remarks during the committee's annual hearing on the state of the international financial system.
He said the administration had been working on AI issues for more than six months and argued that the US should develop more open-source and open AI models.
"We can't let these large labs have regulatory capture, because that will stop innovation," Bessent said.
He also tied the issue to competition with China, accusing Chinese developers of using US models to improve their own systems.
"The Chinese models, they distill from the US models, which is a polite scientific word for steal," he said.
Bessent argued that expanding US open models could eventually make Chinese alternatives less attractive to users.
He also said access to advanced chips was an important part of Washington's approach to AI competition.
"AI runs on the advanced chips that the US has a substantial lead in, so making sure that other countries do not have access to those advanced chips is very important," said Bessent.
He added that Treasury's work had initially focused on the financial sector before lessons from that effort were expanded through the government's Gold Eagle initiative, which he described as a forum for sharing information on resilience.
Bessent said Treasury began working with major banks and their chief information officers in March and had since expanded its engagement to financial institutions of different sizes.
He said those efforts had fed into Project Gold Eagle, which he described as "a clearinghouse for everything that we learn about resiliency."
Bessent also said the administration had been examining AI models for more than five months and coordinating across federal agencies on AI and cybersecurity issues.
Asked about warnings that advanced AI systems could become difficult to control, he stressed the importance of which country develops the technology.
"It does matter whether the good guys or the bad guys have this," he said. "As the person who manages the relationship with China on AI, it matters a great deal."
His remarks came as the administration faces calls from some AI industry leaders and researchers for stronger safeguards around increasingly capable systems, while President Donald Trump has emphasized maintaining the US's lead over China.
