Recently, the Trump administration issued an executive order, a 30-day review window before AI tools are released to the public. This bubbled up on the news (NYT / AP / Guardian). The shift highlights the overall negative feeling the public has about AI's effect. From an Afrofuturist perspective, and that is what is driving my fascination, the goal is/should be collective use of the technology for the greatest good. While I think China’s brand of state funded capitalism is problematic, it is also true that they have made the choice to champion technology for the 21st century. They are all in on AI, but they do regulate it. In fact, the government issued a revised safety framework last year (2025), an update to the 2024 framework.
“It represents a significant evolution in risks covered, including those tied to labor market impacts and chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) weapon misuse. And it introduces more sophisticated risk mitigation measures, establishing a rubric to categorize and grade AI risks that sector-specific regulators should adapt to their domain.”
As you can see, the complexity of the report highlights all the things we are not talking about, ironically, because we are afraid of falling behind the Chinese. There are no easy answers, but if the Chinese government is committed to marshaling these technologies while ensuring safety, I don’t think it is impossible for the United States to do it. What I want us to consider is how a framework like this might be re-imagined through an Afrofuturist framework.
