Remarks by Director Kratsios at the APEC Digital and AI Ministerial Meeting

ACCELERATING AMERICAN AI EXPORTS

AS PREPARED FOR DELIVERY

Incheon, Korea

August 5, 2025

THE DIRECTOR: Thank you for the kind introduction.

It is an honor and a privilege to speak to you today at this Global Digital and AI Forum, representing the United States of America and the administration of President Donald J. Trump.

As you no doubt know, on July 23rd, just two weeks ago, the White House published the President’s AI Action Plan. The plan outlines America’s national effort to remain the leader in pioneering AI and to be the global partner of choice as this technology transforms industries and information flows around the world.

The United States stands resolved to do all it can to accelerate AI innovation, to build out AI infrastructure, and to conduct AI diplomacy.

President Trump began executing the AI Action plan immediately, signing three executive orders following his remarks on the occasion. These included an executive order preventing U.S. government procurement of ideologically biased AI models, an order providing resources for the rapid construction of data centers and power systems, and, finally, an order promoting the export of full-stack American AI technology packages to allies and partners worldwide.

That is why I am here today. Our hope is that AI will be a powerful tool for bilateral diplomacy. We believe that by packaging the American AI stack and making it available to you, we can strengthen our friendships, empower each of our nations’ AI innovation, and secure a peaceful future of shared prosperity.

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In his speech marking the release of the AI Action Plan, President Trump compared today’s technical-industrial contest to be the world leader in AI to the last century’s Space Race. The President called this AI race “a test of our capacities unlike anything since the dawn of the Space Age.”

Carrying forward that theme, my colleague David Sacks, White House AI Czar, has described the president’s Action Plan remarks as the most significant technology speech since President John F. Kennedy told the nation that America had chosen to go to the Moon.

History will prove Mr. Sacks right, I think. We know that here in 2025, we meet in a time much like the one President Kennedy described in 1962, “in an hour of change and challenge, in a decade of hope and fear, in an age of both knowledge and ignorance.”

Our challenge is to confront the changes promised by AI with strength on behalf of our fellow citizens, and our hope is that these technologies will be tools for the growth and exercise of knowledge, and not instruments of ignorance and fear.

This AI race, the AI challenge, what Vice President J.D. Vance has called our AI opportunity, is then indeed very like the Space Race. It is, however, in one sense very unlike the contest that J.F.K. described, for I do not come here today to discuss a Moonshot. The race to lead the building of the future with wisdom and responsibility has no finish line.

As a representative of my government, I am here to discuss not the technology that may arise tomorrow but the technology ready for application today. I come to you not to talk of the promise of potential future technologies but of economic partnerships and the mutual prosperity we can achieve now.

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The Trump administration believes that by extending human capacities and complementing human work, AI already heralds a new industrial revolution, information revolution, and even cultural renaissance.

For AI will empower discoveries in materials, chemicals, medicine, and energy. It has the potential to transform schooling, media, and communications, to retrieve forgotten things and point our eyes to the unnoticed. And this technology may, in representing a confident and hopeful step into the unknown, open doors we do not now even know to look for.

The true technological and new industrial revolution we look forward to today is not the frontier AI systems themselves, but what our peoples will do with them. AI applications as we experience them today already appear poised to be an enormous multiplier for improving our productivity—whether in the factory, the office, or the lab. AI technology is already enhancing the digital revolution in sectors such as health care and agriculture, and further enabling new industries such as robotics, drones, and self-driving vehicles.

Where it takes us next, the Trump administration believes, is for inventors to show us, but we will labor to ensure that it betters the lives of all of our citizens.

***

APEC was founded to be the premier forum for the support of economic growth in the Asia-Pacific region. The dawn of the AI age does not change that. Quite the contrary, I believe there has never been a greater opportunity to increase the dynamism and cooperation of the Asia-Pacific community than that presented by this technology.

Thanks to President Trump, American AI is open for business. We are ready to make deals under the dealmaker in chief. As we speak, the clock is ticking as my office at the White House and the Secretary of State assist the Secretary of Commerce in establishing the American AI Exports Program, which will carry out the development and deployment of the U.S. AI stack, packaged for each customer nation’s convenience.

The program is fielding proposals from the American AI industry for packages that will include AI-optimized hardware such as chips and servers, data center storage, cloud services, and networking; data pipelines and labeling systems; AI models and programs; security and cybersecurity systems; as well as AI applications for specific use cases such as software engineering, education, healthcare, agriculture, and transportation.

As needed, the United States is eager to employ all available U.S. Federal financial tools to support priority AI export packages. These include direct loans, loan guarantees, equity investments, co-financing, political risk insurance, credit guarantees, technical assistance, and feasibility studies.  

President Trump’s administration is unapologetically America First. We want what is best for the American people, above all. Fortunately, as AI transforms the future of global commerce it presents an opportunity for mutual benefit.

We know you want what’s best for your country, too. With the AI export packages we are developing, we want you to have the AI sovereignty, data privacy, and technical customization that you so rightly demand on behalf of your peoples. We are committed to finding a way to enable America’s private companies to meet your national technological needs.

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With the AI Action Plan, the Trump Administration is getting the Federal government out of the way of America’s AI innovators, to create space for real competition and creativity, so that companies can create the kinds of products every type of consumer will find truly useful. This administration seeks to free the power of private industry to commercialize breakthrough technologies, prevent monopoly, and build the future. It believes that the broad overregulation of AI incentivizes centralization and censorship.

America still holds a commanding lead in the race to provide the rest of the world with AI infrastructure and applications. The gap between the AI stack on offer from the United States and that of our closest competitors remains significant and undeniable. For the foundation of rival AI systems is American AI—American models and American AI discoveries. Old and mighty countries are the home and origin of many cultural and technological achievements, but the United States remains the nation of innovators and birthplace of AI.

Competitor nations may be following American innovations quickly, but they are still only following. American companies and American ideas still lead the way. But this is not just to make a claim about technical capacities or sophistication.

I also want to reiterate the independence and privacy that can be expected from AI technologies and infrastructure that have been Made In America. There are features of the American character—our commitment to property rights, to freedom, yes, even to endless lawsuits—that stand guard against danger to your sovereignty.

As made clear in the President’s Action Plan, the United States is committed to supporting the development and deployment of open-source and open-weight AI models. We understand that your governments and national champion businesses seek to carefully steward your people’s sensitive data, and so cannot always employ a closed proprietary model. Indeed, the best open-source and open-weight models may become industry standard setters. We are therefore taking concrete steps to enable and empower their developers.

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This afternoon, I want to recognize that each of the APEC economies has a choice before it: You can follow the European model of fear and overregulation, and be inevitably left behind, succumbing to stasis as the states around you move forward in settling a new frontier and building a new future. Or you can take our offered handshake and make a deal. The next trailblazing breakthroughs will be made with and on American technology, and to fully harness them, you will want America’s AI infrastructure already in place.

While some states believe it is their task to construct and direct an industrial and scientific machine for their advancement, America has been the center of global science and technology and the world leader in techno-scientific development because our experiment in self-government has again and again given our innovators the freedom to launch mankind into new technological frontiers.

We believe the way of progress is found in human judgment and friendly cooperation, in political freedom and civic responsibility, in sovereignty and independence, not global governance and technocratic control.

This is why the president has called us to usher in a new Golden Age, to recapture the spirit of discovery and adventure that carved a new nation out of the wilderness, tamed the wilds of the West, and put human feet upon the moon. Americans have always been explorers, inventors, and pioneers, and have mastered each new frontier of science and technology and so made humanity safer, healthier, and more prosperous than ever before.

With the export of the American AI stack around the world, we continue that legacy.

Thank you.