America is facing the greatest national security emergency in history. AI and robotics systems that rival human capabilities will likely emerge within the next five to 10 years. We’re already using software products that can mimic or exceed human intelligence in some domains — and hardware will be next. Waymo is here (and expanding). Tesla Optimus estimates it’s ~five to 10 years from obviating repetitive human labor via robotics at scale.

Once physical AI is integrated across all domains, we’re likely to experience centuries’ worth of technological and scientific progress in the decades that follow — across manufacturing, defense tech, biotech, energy, materials science, and pretty much every domain that matters to human progress.

Whoever wins the race for physical AI will win everything.

Our primary competitor (right now, at least) is China. As it stands, we have one crippling disadvantage: our outdated regulatory code. For the last 50 years, it’s been virtually impossible to build factories for physical AI at scale, particularly in close proximity to our smartest people in tech, most of whom live in and around coastal cities. If we want to win the race to build physical AI, we’re going to need to figure this out.

Here’s one small example of how regulation gets in the way: Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) compliance approval for new robotics applications often takes six to 12 months in the U.S. Amazon spent 18 months getting approval for warehouse robots, while Tesla faces separate eight to 12 month approval cycles for each new Optimus task.

Meanwhile, Chinese factories deploy similar robotic systems in days. They’re five to 10 times faster at building more manufacturing than us, easily. We can’t compete against this.

So, if we want to unleash our full potential to innovate in the physical world — and we don’t want to let ourselves become even more dependent on China — the solution is obvious: we must free ourselves from hostile regulation. There are many ways to do this, but the fastest is to create a federal special economic zone that can circumvent the regulatory and bureaucratic morass that lies at the heart of this crisis.

This idea is not new: Tomas Pueyo has proposed turning Guantanamo Bay, the Presidio, and SpaceX’s Starbase into special regulation districts — but, so far, none have come to fruition. The idea always feels intangible and a little crazy, but it’s really not. We just haven’t found a location that’s realistic (and by realistic, I mean empty and near people who might realistically be incentivized to develop it).

Enter: Alameda Point

The most promising location for such a zone in the entire country, I believe, is Alameda Point — the former site of a U.S. Naval Air Base and now largely abandoned federal land. It’s located in America’s epicenter of technological innovation: the Bay Area. If the old guard in the Bay (back when literal silicon semiconductors were innovative) is “Silicon Valley,” we can call this new district “Frontier Valley.”

It’s empty, centrally located, larger than SF’s SoMa district, and — crucially — federally owned.

The specifics would depend on what the federal government and participating companies choose to build, but to paint a picture of Frontier Valley, imagine this: swarms of humanoid robots that fully construct and operate world-class medical centers, energy grids, vertical farms, factories and landscaping for the zone — all across the street from where these technologies are developed.

Over time, the zone could evolve into a blueprint for future towns that build and sustain themselves via humanoid robots, materials, and protocols, paying off their total investment cost gradually with robotic labor. Through automating as much of our urban infrastructure and services as possible, we’d put ourselves on a path toward unlocking sovereignty and abundance for every American (and then, everyone on Earth).

All we’d need to enact this district is an executive order, which would immediately and unilaterally carve out new jurisdictions on this swath of federal land by:

1. Exercising the Endangered Species Act 7(j) exemption to reactivate this plot of land, a former US Naval base that closed in 1997,

1. Invoking the National Emergencies Act to maximally accelerate federal permitting across all domains, and

1. Transfering ownership of the land from the VA to the Department of Defense.

Given the state of the AI race today, and the disadvantages inherent in our regulatory code, it would be irresponsible of us not to create at least one isolated sandbox for innovation. And where better to create it than where the world’s top tech and entrepreneurial talent is based? Plus, if it’s successful, this could become a template for special regulation zones that can be replicated many times over across the U.S.

This national security crisis isn’t a distant threat — it’s unfolding right now, and accelerating. That urgency has already galvanized many top-tier founders and startups in Silicon Valley to rally around the idea of Frontier Valley.

The ecosystem (Silicon Valley) and the specific plot of land within that ecosystem (Alameda Point) are uncontested. And the legal pathway for enacting this is straightforward, immediate, and ironclad. All that remains is for Trump to take one simple, decisive action to unleash Silicon Valley’s unparalleled talent pool to realize its full potential in the world of atoms, and to lock-in American prosperity for eons to come.

China wouldn’t hesitate to execute this winning play, and neither should we.

—James Ingallinera