The White House proved today that embracing AI is a winning message

The last week has been full of fear-mongering: Bill Gates warning AI could cause “a billion deaths,” on Meet The Press, Anthropic once again touting its tech as posing “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity” in its filing ahead of a possible IPO, and even SNL calling out Dario Amodei’s doomerism.

But this week the White House is countering that narrative by showing Americans what AI can actually do for them — get a passport without waiting months for an appointment and trekking to some office, sign up for Medicare, check on student loan payments, and search for a federal job.

“This kind of innovation in government is just a preview of what is possible with super intelligence,” Trump said.

On Tuesday, at an event that felt less like a bureaucratic symposium and more like an Apple keynote, the federal government demonstrated how it is using AI on its newly unveiled and elegantly designed website, America.gov.

The event at the Andrew Mellon Auditorium celebrated the government’s new website, which uses AI to make federal programs more accessible and is still in the process of introducing additional features. The new website is powered by Grok and Gemini and includes a chatbot that answers your questions. 

And the function came together in a matter of days with invitations sent just this last week. 

It’s rare to see anything involving the federal government happen that quickly — let alone with a new website that looks this good, thanks to former Airbnb co-founder and US Chief Design Officer Joe Gebbia. Of course given the 2013 Healthcare.gov rollout debacle, perhaps we should still proceed with caution — but it’s an encouraging start.

Imagine actually being able to get a useful answer about taxes without dealing with the IRS or using AI to help identify fraud before taxpayers foot the bill? That would be transformative — and if today is any indication, it can happen.

But the lesson for technology companies and techno optimists is that actually demonstrating a technology’s benefit and showing how it can make life easier is better than telling people how to feel. One way to change the fact that more than half of all Americans are more concerned than excited about AI is to show how useful it can be. And given an estimated 40 million people interact with a government website every day, that can change a lot of minds. 

All of this is demonstrating a very different pro-innovation path that Republicans and Trump are owning, showing that the federal government’s services can feel more like they are powered by a digitally native innovator than someone at the DMV. Republicans are rightfully taking another bet: developing AI, using it in government, and not regulating the US out of the race.

“I will never stifle the growth of technology that will be bigger than the industrial revolution,” Trump reiterated today.

This initiative also paints a dramatic contrast to the messaging — which, in some cases, is driving much of that concern — from Democrats and their donors.

At the same time that doomers like Gates (who reportedly donated $50 million to Kamala in the last election cycle) are shouting warnings, Democrats are rolling out bills to pause frontier models and stifle innovation with a “superintelligence” ban, which conveniently aligns with messaging from Democratic donors such as Gates and would cement Anthropic and OpenAI as the frontier-lab frontrunners.

And the optimists are gaining steam. This week, a data-center party hosted at the PubKey bar in Washington, DC, turned into an all-out rager with nearly 1,000 attendees.

To be sure, many economic analysts suggest AI is almost single-handedly keeping the markets and Trump’s economy afloat. And, to be sure, there are indeed uncertainties about artificial intelligence and how powerful it could become. The fact that OpenAI has kept its model GPT-6.1 Astra from getting released until it’s proven safer is the right and smart thing to do.

But Gates’s solution of an international governing body? I cannot imagine something worse than a UN-like body in charge of AI. Or Bernie Sanders working with the CCP. Or AOC trying to halt advancement altogether.

Those are not American solutions. And this week, we saw that embracing innovation can do more for Americans than scaring them about it.