Vice President JD Vance tried during a speech Tuesday to mend the fracture between two clashing factions of the MAGA coalition: techno-optimists like Elon Musk and populists like Steve Bannon.
“I’d ask my friends, both on the tech optimist side and on the populist side, not to see the failure of the logic of globalization as a failure of innovation,” Vance said at the American Dynamism Summit. “Indeed, I’d say that globalization’s hunger for cheap labor is a problem — precisely because it’s been bad for innovation.
“The solution, I believe, is American innovation,” he added. “Because in the long run, it’s technology that increases the value of labor innovations.”
The summit, organized by California-based venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, hosts tech companies in areas such as defense, housing, public safety, aerospace engineering and manufacturing.
During his speech, Vance argued President Donald Trump’s efforts to bring back industrial manufacturing to the U.S. would also launch tech innovation forward, attempting to rebuke concerns from many in the tech sector that the administration might be looking backward rather than forward when setting its economic policy.
“For far too long, we got addicted to cheap labor, both overseas and by importing it into our own country, and we got lazy. We over-regulated our industries instead of supporting them,” Vance said. “We made it way too hard to build things and invest things in the United States of America.”
Vance proposed to create a hands-off regulatory environment that allows for faster tech innovation in fields like AI while at the same time favoring local industrial manufacturing, despite economists’ warnings that Trump’s economic policies could negatively affect American consumers.
He argued that the manufacturing dominance of adversaries like China has given them the resources and leverage to progress in both manufacturing and tech development — creating a threat for U.S. national security.
“I’m speaking of China that will pass up on the opportunity to use AI or any other technology to advance their own interests and further undermine the interests of their rivals,” Vance said. “The answer is obvious, and that’s why America, we’ve got to be tech-forward.
China’s public investments in AI have recently shattered the AI industry and lawmakers’ assumptions about AI dominance, despite mounting U.S. export restrictions. China’s state-backed AI companies have developed models that rival some of the most advanced Western AIs with only a fraction of the development cost.
Vance relayed a similar message at the Paris AI Action Summit last month, where he warned that excessive AI regulations might stifle rapid growth in the industry.
“Yes, there are risks, but we have to be leaning into the AI future with optimism and hope because I think real technological innovation is going to make our country stronger,” Vance said.
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Samuel Larreal is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.