This week, President Donald Trump signed a new executive order on artificial intelligence and the Pentagon declassified part of its AI strategy. Neither was a first attempt at a national AI strategy. In 2016, the Obama administration published a comprehensive plan on the future of AI, which never had time to gain the momentum it needed in government. The Pentagon has been researching intelligent machines for the better part of 60 years, and only recently did it come to a consensus: Our future wars will be fought in code, using data and algorithms as powerful weapons. Using AI techniques, a military can “win” by destabilizing an economy rather than demolishing countrysides and city centers. From that perspective, and given China’s unified march advancing artificial intelligence, China is dangerously far ahead of the West.

WIRED OPINION ABOUT Amy Webb (@amywebb) is a professor at the NYU Stern School of Business and is the chief executive of the Future Today Institute, a strategic foresight and research group in Washington, DC.

In my view, we’ve come to this realization too late. Regardless of what orders might be signed or what new strategies are put into action, Washington is going to have a recruitment problem: There just aren’t enough incentives to lure AI talent away from high-paying jobs with great benefits into a life of public service.

The future of AI—and, by extension, the future of humanity—is already controlled by just nine big tech titans, who are developing the frameworks, chipsets, and networks, funding the majority of research, earning the lion’s share of patents, and, in the process, mining our data in ways that aren’t transparent or observable. Six are in the US, and I call them the G-MAFIA: Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, IBM, and Apple. Three are in China, and they are the BAT: Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent.

The few government agencies built for innovation—the US Digital Service, the US Army’s Futures Command, the Defense Innovation Board, and the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) initiatives—are brittle in their youth and subject to defunding and staff reductions as the revolving door of political appointees spins. In practical terms, there is too little strategic collaboration between the G-MAFIA and our government agencies or military offices—at least not without a lucrative contract in place. While the G-MAFIA usually lobby for huge tax incentives and breaks to do business, they also must agree to the arcane, outdated procurement requirement policies of the military and government. This doesn’t exactly accelerate AI in our national interest. If anything, it shines a bright light on the cultural differences between Silicon Valley and DC, and it slows down modernization.

Washington and the G-MAFIA tend to view their relationship as transactional, not collaborative. During the past several years, neither lawmakers nor the White House has made an honest effort to develop the kind of relationships with G-MAFIA executives necessary for a long-term coalition on AI. The G-MAFIA, US military, and government circle around each other without ever converging in our national interest. Without collaboration, would-be researchers, scientists, and managers don’t have the opportunity to meet each other, cultivate a network, and form the close relationships that typically lead to talent transfer between organizations like we typically see in other industries.

In my own meetings at the Pentagon with Department of Defense officials, an alternative view on the future of warfare (code vs. combat) has taken too long to find widespread alignment. For example, in 2017, the DOD established an Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team to work on something called Project Maven—a computer vision and deep-learning system that autonomously recognizes objects from still images and videos. The team didn’t have the necessary AI capabilities, so the DOD contracted with Google for help training AI systems to analyze drone footage. But no one told the Google employees assigned to the project that they’d actually been working on a military project, and that resulted in high-profile backlash. Four thousand Google employees signed a petition objecting to Project Maven. They took out a full-page ad in The New York Times, and ultimately dozens of employees resigned. Eventually, Google said that it wouldn’t renew its contract with the DOD.

Amazon, too, came under fire because of a Pentagon contract worth $110 billion. In October 2018, House Appropriations Committee members Tom Cole (R-Oklahoma) and Steve Womack (R-Arkansas) accused the DOD of conspiring with Amazon to tailor the contract so that no other tech giant would qualify. But that wasn’t the only complaint. There was a small wave of dissent at Amazon. Some Amazon workers were outraged that the company would do any work at all with the US military, while others didn’t like that Amazon’s facial recognition technology was being used by law enforcement. In response, Jeff Bezos told an audience at WIRED's own 25th anniversary conference, “If big tech companies are going to turn their back on the US Department of Defense, this country is going to be in trouble.”