Government action might be required to manage and regulate AI, but it's inconsequential in its development. AI will be developed by private American companies, and the lead they have over international competitors is staggering.
For more than half a century, the best and brightest minds in the world have come to America. Bret Stephens put it best:
>As for Nobelists, a report by George Mason’s Institute for Immigration Research found that Americans have won 40 percent of all Nobel Prizes ever awarded — and immigrants accounted for 35 percent of those winners. Last year, the only native-born American to win the prize was Bob Dylan, for literature. The rest of the American winners — economist Oliver Hart, physicist J. Michael Kosterlitz, chemist Fraser Stoddart — are immigrants.
>A common American conceit is that we attract brilliant foreigners because we have brilliant things: great universities, vast financial resources, a dynamic economy, high-tech. That gets things mostly backward. It’s because we have brilliant foreigners that we have those things in the first place. Google. Comcast. eBay. Kraft. Pfizer. AT&T. They all had immigrants as founders.
>Overall, a 2016 study by the Partnership for the New American Economy found that 40 percent of all Fortune 500 companies were founded or co-founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants. Taken together they employed 19 million people and had revenues of $4.8 trillion.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/opinion/daca-trump-dreame...
The United States will be the leader in all major technological advancements for the conceivable future, because there is more genius in the United States than there is in the rest of the world combined. There has never, in human history, been a nation so adept at attracting the best and brightest minds from the far reaches of the globe.
No other country comes close to possessing the capacity for invention and sheer brilliance that the US does.