Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator:  In a recent op-ed in the Washington Post, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posed a simple but striking question: “Who will control the future of AI?” Altman frames the choice as between two futures: “Will it be one in which the United States and allied nations advance a global AI that spreads the technology’s benefits and opens access to it, or an authoritarian one, in which nations or movements that don’t share our values use AI to cement and expand their power? There is no third option—and it’s time to decide which path to take.”1 Implicit in Altman’s binary framing is that Silicon Valley and companies like his own are our democratic bulwark against a techno-authoritarian future in which China is predominant. National security and foreign policy arguments like this one have become increasingly common in AI and technology policy conversations. The basic contours of the argument go something like this: The United States needs – and should depend on – its leading companies to maintain the AI innovation edge and establish dominance in AI in order to win the global competition with China. Anything that might restrain these leading companies (i.e. regulation, antitrust enforcement, or other government actions in the space—with the notable exception of massive public R&D investment that American industry can eventually commercialize) will cause the United States to lose to China. In this paper, we argue instead that there is a better way to ensure artificial intelligence advances U.S. national security: public AI. By public AI, we mean two things: publicly- provided, -owned and -operated layers in the AI tech stack, such as cloud infrastructure, data, and model development; and public utility-style regulation of the private AI industry that fosters competition and prevents abuses of power. In the process, we show that relying on unregulated AI national champions2—an unbridled Silicon Valley—carries considerable risks for national security.