Sarah Rogers, the U.S. Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy, argues that AI represents a more consequential inflection point than the printing press or the internet, and that the West is currently losing the framing war over how it gets regulated. Speaking at the a16z American Dynamism Summit, Rogers names the EU's Thierry Breton letter to X as a concrete example of Western governments weaponizing speech regulation, a move she treats as indistinguishable in effect from authoritarian censorship.
The conversation cuts through the phrase 'AI safety' to expose the regulatory capture underneath it. Rogers frames the choice plainly: open systems built on rule-of-law principles, what she calls 'AI with a Western soul,' versus closed, state-controlled models being exported by China. Her office, the Digital Freedom Office, is specifically tasked with reversing government censorship, including censorship by allied governments. That detail alone is worth reading the full transcript for.
The section starting at 16:42 on AI and national security is the sharpest part of this conversation. Rogers does not treat this as an abstract policy debate. The argument is that regulatory overreach and censorship infrastructure, once built, do not get dismantled. Governments that treat AI as a control platform rather than a communications platform are making a permanent architectural choice. The question Rogers leaves open is whether democratic governments will move fast enough to lock in the alternative.
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