This article originally appeared on Shyam Sankar’s Substack.

A decade ago, Google pulled out of Project Maven to quell an internal revolt against working with the U.S. military. AI was too powerful, the critics said. The military couldn’t be trusted to wield it.

For a while, it seemed those days were over. Frontier AI labs (Google included) got back in the fight, publicly committing to help America win the AI race. But there are troubling signs that the Valley is backsliding.

Why is this happening? A few reasons. It’s partially a reflection of AI builders’ deep ambivalence, even pessimism, about the technology they are creating. It’s also a reflection of their barely concealed loathing of the Trump administration and its policies. But the fundamental reason is psychological.

Andrej Karpathy coined the term “jagged intelligence” to describe how AI is smart about some things but dumb about others. Human intelligence is “jagged” in the same way — and technologists’ intelligence is more jagged than most.

Technology is built by brilliant idealists. This quality enables a certain type of person to build the future. But brilliance bleeds into hubris and idealism bleeds into naiveté. Too many assume that technical genius confers a special political wisdom. That building technology qualifies them to control how our society deploys it.

Some of these brilliant idealists have decided America, its leaders, and its employees can’t be trusted with the powerful tools they’ve built. They think micromanaging access is the right way to protect democracy and human rights.

But they’re wrong. So wrong that they don’t realize how their own activism makes the dangers they fear more likely. Restricting AI in America doesn’t make us safer or freer. It simply gives an advantage to actual tyrants — the Chinese Communist Party — in a technology race. America winning this race is humanity’s best shot that AI will be used for good. China winning would be a disaster.

How can I write this so confidently? Because we’ve seen this movie before. Within living memory, Americans debated the morality of building another paradigm-shifting technology: nuclear weapons. Jagged intelligence was on full display in those debates. Smart people argued passionately for policies they thought would make us safe — but that in fact weakened America and doomed millions trapped behind the Iron Curtain.

Knowingly or not, AI researchers are recreating the debates and errors of an earlier generation. We have to learn from that history. And we have to choose differently by helping America build the technology that will determine whether the 21st century is free or unfree.