Trump’s Tech Brawler At The State Department

If you want to impress a foreign official, the State Department’s storied Treaty Room, with its gilded arches, baroque chandeliers, elaborate portraiture and historical heft, provides the perfect set for political theater. These days, signing an actual treaty in the State Department’s storied Treaty Room is an exceedingly rare occurrence. But on this day in early May, it was being used to make a point: It’s time to get behind the U.S. to beat back China’s technological supremacy.

More than 30 diplomats, State officials and staffers cram in there, decked out for the occasion with an array of Norwegian and U.S. flags. Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg, a one-time anti-TikTok crusader and Democratic fundraiser turned “Trump whisperer,” strides into the room. Accompanying him is Anniken Huitfeldt, Norway’s ambassador to the U.S. After customary speeches — today’s are all about securing supply chain security — Huitfeldt and Helberg take pen in hand and get down to business: signing Norway onto Helberg’ssignature Pax Silica Declaration.

For all the pomp, there’s an assembly line feel to the process that reflects how practiced Helberg and his team have become in steering — some would argue strong-arming — foreign officials into signing the Pax Silica and join a coalition aimed to break the back of China’s control of the mineral supply chain essential to the technologies fueling the artificial intelligence revolution. So far, Helberg has managed to land a total of 24 country members — including the European Union and critical mineral resource powerhouses Chile and Kazakhstan — to sign the declaration.

His pitch to foreign governments is simple: link arms — fast — with the U.S. to oppose what he calls Beijing’s “systemic weaponization” of the global supply chain or risk losing control of tech infrastructure to “people who don’t have our best interests at heart.”

The stakes are high. Helberg's role as the State Department's AI champion coincides with a souring in public sentiment that’s intensified this year, particularly over concerns about data centers and a more visceral fear that a super intelligent AI system could plot the extinction of the human race.

Meanwhile, Beijing has weaponized its dominance with rare earth minerals through export restrictions that have starved U.S. defense and civilian manufacturing of essential production materials.Helberg seeks to end that dependency and spur joint high tech research, development and manufacturing among the U.S. and its allies and partners. And if that means twisting the arms of allies, then so be it.

Central Asian countries are learning that the hard way. As an example, mineral-rich Kazakhstan — the target of a Trump administration charm campaign — faces possible expulsion from the coalition for joining a rival grouping Beijing launched in July. The State Department is poised to warn Kazakhstan and other Pax Silica participants that they can’t be members of “duplicative initiatives whose expectations conflict with our own,” Reuters reported last month, which could effectively block neighboring Uzbekistan as well.

At the center of the effort is Helberg himself, a French-born member of the Silicon Valley tech elite who, at 36, is one of the youngest people in the senior ranks of the State Department — and an avatar for the Trump administration’s cozy yet fraught relationship with Big Tech.

Helberg’s speed, ambition and sharp-elbowed approach to policy reflect sensibilities forged during a decade-plus tenure in Silicon Valley that included stints at Google and Palantir Technologies, where he advised Alex Karp, its controversial CEO. His ease in applying a Silicon Valley-style move-quickly-and-break things approach has made his State Department role — a traditionally lower-key position — frontline in the Trump administration’s race to outpace Beijing’s funnelling of massive resources into its tech sector.

That strategy is essential to ensuring that Beijing doesn’t surpass the U.S. in the development of key technologies that will define national power in the 21st century, Helberg says.

“Technology is the whole game,” Helberg says in a rare interview. “Whoever leads the world technologically will likely also lead economically and militarily.”

His rapid rise underscores the ascendancy of tech executives in key roles of influence in the Trump administration, which critics argue is part of a broader and concerning trend. Besides Helberg, other tech moguls wielding power in the White House include recently departed White Housesenior policy adviser for AI Sriram Krishnan and David Sacks, who served as President Donald Trump’s special adviser on artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency and is now co-chair of his President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

“There’s a synergy between this fully unrestrained Trump White House and big tech and big tech billionaires who have real policy preferences in blocking AI regulation and the retreat from crypto and financial sector regulatory enforcement,” says Rick Claypool, a research director at the left- leaning nonprofit Public Citizen, who has written extensively on the tech sector’s impact on the U.S. economy.

“The default position has become what's good for big tech billionaires is what's good for America.”

Business — particularly that of the U.S. high technology sector — is central to Helberg’s brand. He literally married into the ranks of U.S. tech titans when he wed venture capitalist Keith Rabois in 2018 in a ceremonyofficiated by Altman and attended by awho’s-who of Silicon Valley elite. Rabois is a member of theso-called PayPal mafia, a grouping of early tech investors that included Sacks, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.

It’s worth noting that Helberg has had personal financial skin in the game of ensuring what he and other tech-fluent administration insiders see as the “right” policies governing the sector. Over the years he has channeled his faith in AI and the U.S. companies pioneering its development into lucrative investments in the sector and its backers. POLITICO accessed a 70-page financial transaction disclosure report required of all Senate-confirmed government officials that details Helberg’s sales of millions of dollars of investments in tech companies including OpenAI, Palantir, Tesla and Meta in December 2025 and January 2026. The document includes an assessment by the U.S. Office of Government Ethics that Helberg “is in compliance with applicable laws and regulations.”

Helberg shrugs off concerns that the tech titans are too chummy with the White House. As he sees it, the prominence of tech sector elites in the Trump administration is an overdue recognition that a traditional arms-length relationship between Washington and Silicon Valley fed a “translation gap” that kneecapped U.S. competitiveness with Beijing.

“For years, Washington's default was that anyone who actually understood technology was disqualified from governing it,” Helberg says. “So we got a government that regulated what it didn't understand and missed what it couldn't see — while Beijing fused its tech sector and its state into one weapon.”

These days, Helberg’s role at State puts him on the front lines of the U.S.-China tech rivalry rooted in Beijing’s near monopoly in the supply of critical minerals essential to the development of artificial intelligence and quantum computing. And that means that he — along with members of the tech sector elite such as Musk, Altman and Sacks — has a direct line to the White House as it weighs how to challenge Beijing without derailing a fragile trade truce that Trump struck with China’s leader Xi Jinping in October.

Still, his success hinges on whether his vision of a Beijing-beating, U.S.-led united front of high technology collaboration can overcome a deepening skepticism among traditional allies who increasingly see China as a more dependable partner than the U.S. — and who believe the Asian economic colossus is already winning the race to tech dominance.

“Every American manufacturing job sits on top of a supply chain,” Helberg says. He sees his role at State as ensuring that supply chain “delivers reliable inputs at market prices — not at whatever price Beijing decides to charge us in a crisis.”

Helberg’s road to the State Department began in the western Parisian suburb of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, population of about 40,000, where he was born in 1989 within hours of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the beginning of the end of the Cold War.

The son of a French mother and an American father, Helberg spent his formative years in Europe, first in France and later in Belgium. But he spent summers in Ohio with his father’s side of the family, where he developed “a belief in American exceptionalism” that he saw as an antidote to the “soft defeatism” he perceived in France.

“Even though we were living in France, my family was actually very American. My dad would always find ways of smuggling American food into France, which before Amazon was non-trivial,” says Helberg, who moved to the U.S. at 18 in 2008 to attend college. “We got a satellite dish so that we could get American TV at our house against the censorship of the French media, which had quotas on American movies back then.”

Helberg’s affinity for American culture and experience as a religious minority — Jewish in a sea of French Catholicism — heightened his sense of distance from Europe. “I felt like an outsider, because I identified with America more than with Europe,” says Helberg, the grandson of two Holocaust survivors. “I felt constantly frustrated in Europe because it felt like you're in an environment where you're surrounded by artificial rules that make no sense other than to make people's lives incredibly inconvenient and discourage any sense of individual initiative or critical thinking. And that drove me nuts. It just felt like in America, you just felt more free.”

After the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, Helberg’s sense of alienation between the land of his birth and his father’s America intensified. European governments’ disapproval of the war — French and German leaders openly criticized the U.S. invasion — permeated French society. At the age of 14, Helberg says, he became a target of what he called “anti-Americanism” among his French teachers and classmates in class and at recess.

“I found myself often defending the position of the Bush administration, because, in my mind, I was defending America,” Helberg says. “I would not miss an opportunity to jump into that debate to take America's defense in class, which landed me in the principal's office more than once. But it was fun in hindsight.”

Decades later Helberg has sharpened his conviction of U.S. superiority over Europe. He believes the continent’s politics and bureaucracy — plus what he calls a cultural “tall poppy syndrome” — is stifling the creativity essential to economic success in the 21st century. In April, during a speech in Brussels, Helberg decried what he called the European Union’s “Caligulan bureaucracy” and the “civilizational emergency” facing Europe over its failure to embrace digital technology in the 2010s.

One of Helberg’s friends, who has known him since he was a teenager, says his criticism of Europe reflects a “tough friend” approach toward a continent whose policies he sees as self-destructive. “I don’t think he doesn’t care about Europe or despises Europe,” says the friend who was granted anonymity to candidly discuss a personal relationship. “He believes that in order to stay relevant Europe needs to take a harsher stance on a number of things — like immigration.” 

Given Helberg’s infatuation with the U.S., leaving Europe to attend The George Washington University was all but inevitable. After he graduated with a degree in international relations — and after a one-semester detour to study law at Sciences Po Law School in Paris — he joined his sister in California, where he says he “just completely randomly happened to start to connect with Silicon Valley.”

Once there Helberg fell in with a generation of young, ambitious Americans drawn to opportunities in the exploding tech industry in Silicon Valley. He broke into the sector with jobs in two start-ups including the geopolitical risk prediction company GeoQuant. By 2016 he was leading Google's global search policy team where he cut his teeth on tech foreign diplomacy hinged on a “take nothing down unless it’s illegal” policy.

“It required doing a lot of communication to foreign governments who obviously shared a totally different view on how we should approach search results — much more censorious,” Helberg says.

Those years at Google gave Helberg insights into “a lot of the behavior of China from an aggressive adversarial standpoint,” says Christian Garrett, a partner at the tech-focused venture capital firm 137 Partners who has known Helberg since 2020. “He was very early seeing what the national security risk implications were based on what China was doing economically — everything from infiltrating and hacking into Google to some of the work they were doing on critical infrastructure and networking and fiber cables. And he's been very early on sounding that alarm.”

Helberg’s Silicon Valley tenure also gave him the opportunity to forge ties with some of the industry’s most important players, including his husband-to-be Rabois, managing director at venture capital firm Khosla Ventures which specializes in seed money for promising tech start-ups.

In 2019, Helberg went back to school to get a master’s degree in cybersecurity risk and strategy at New York University, while continuing to work at Google. But the following year, he left Google after weathering what he called “militant” staff protests against its Project Maven cooperation with the Pentagon — which the company subsequently canceled in 2018 — and an abortive effort to re-enter the Chinese market.

“I just felt that the job of Google was not to pass judgment on the policy of the administration, but was to support the Department of Defense, regardless of who's in the White House,” he says.

Over the next three years, Helberg focused on sharpening his credentials on the intersection of tech and China’s national security threat. His first stop was a senior advisor role at the Stanford University Center on Geopolitics and Technology. Says Andrew Grotton, the program’s founder, who hired Helberg, “I was happy to support a rising expert in the field to contribute unique insights to policy debates about the role of technology in our competition with China and other authoritarian governments.” After that stint, Helberg served as co-chair of the Brookings Institution China Strategy Working Group and the U.S.-France Working Group on China. (Brookings didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

In 2022, Helberg broke into the Washington China policy network when then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy appointed him to a two-year term on the congressionally-funded U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which was designed to monitor China’s compliance with its commitments when it joined the World Trade Organization. His tenure on the commission hardened his view of China as predatory and exploitative.

“Every single year,” Helberg says, “the main takeaway from the report is China's not been complying.”

His time on the commission wasn’t without controversy. Some of his fellow commissioners bristled at what they saw as Helberg’s relative lack of knowledge and experience on China issues and his emphasis on tech sector approaches rather than the commission’s traditional focus on trade issues.

“From the beginning, it was, ‘You people don't know anything about tech. I am here to teach you about tech, and pretty much to represent tech,’” a person familiar with Helberg’s tenure on the commission and granted anonymity because of the sensitivity of his comments tells POLITICO Magazine.

“There was a point when he said, ‘We're going to war with China.’ But it wasn't some dispassionate military analysis. It struck me as something that was in line with particular tech industry interests — companies like Palantir — that were trying to sell new technologies to the Pentagon.”

Helberg declined to comment on those criticisms and instead referred POLITICO Magazine to Michael Wessel, who served on the commission from 2001 to 2024.

“No other commissioner had the depth of knowledge and awareness of the industry realities on these issues,” Wessel says. “To me, he was a confidante and partner and, if feathers were ruffled, it was probably because he was challenging the outdated and misguided approaches some might have been advocating.”

Colleagues were also rankled by Helberg’s use of his commissioner role for self-promotion.

“He had his own PR firm and he would show up to be interviewed on cable networks, not timed to anything, but claiming to be speaking for the commission,” says the former colleague, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “That bothered the chairman of the commission and I think the staff director told him to stop doing that.”

Wessel, for his part, says Helberg took a “humble and inquisitive” approach to the role. As for the press briefings, Wessel says, “How Jacob engaged the press or news outlets is irrelevant — the important thing is that he wasn’t satisfied with the status quo.”

Another person familiar with Helberg’s tenure on the commission says that Helberg showed little interest in familiarizing himself with the institution. And Helberg’s requests that commission staff walk him through one-on-one briefings ahead of commission hearings — unheard of among other commissioners — also raised eyebrows.

“I had the sense that he used it as a stepping stone — he didn’t care about the process or how the commission worked,” the person says. “He was trying to build a brand.”

In 2022, while he served on the commission, Helberg also launched the Hill & Valley Forum — a gathering of tech executives, lawmakers and administration officials — focused on countering China’s national security threats. The event had its roots in informal dinner parties in Miami where Helberg and Delian Asparouhov, a partner at the tech-focused venture capital firm Founders Fund, brought together tech executives and politicians to talk about intersecting interests. (Asparaouhov is a Hill & Valley co-founder along with Christian Garrett.)

“It's become like a default meeting place for leaders in tech and Capitol Hill,” Asparouhov says. “I definitely know of backroom conversations from prior years that turned into nuclear- and energy- related policies. And it's even become a place where venture capital and national security focused investors have met with founders. I know of several fundraising rounds that basically came together because of Hill & Valley.”

Helberg’s time in Silicon Valley also allowed him to renew his friendship with Karp, the CEO of Palantir Technologies, a software firm that specializes in data analytics software that it markets to clients ranging from the Pentagon and foreign militaries to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Karp — a neurodivergent, dyslexic genius with a doctorate in philosophy from Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany — has built Palantir into what Helberg has christened  “the AI arms dealer of the 21st century.”

The two first met in Europe, almost by happenstance, when Helberg was a senior in high school. He and his sister were puzzling over the “open-ended questions” in U.S. university application forms. Karp, the friend of the father of one of Helberg’s classmates, advised the siblings on both application strategies and school choice. For Helberg the encounter was transformative.

“I benefitted a lot from just learning by osmosis, by learning how he thinks,” says Helberg, who calls Karp “a mentor.” In 2023 he joined Palantir as Karp’s senior adviser — just as the company was rising from niche Silicon Valley start-up to a security and defense sector colossus with a market capitalization of more than 300 billion dollars.

Karp’s often bombastic public comments have made him a magnet for criticism, like the time he mused about launching drone strikes on his business enemies during a Hill & Valley Forum session in 2024. And there have been questions raised about the ethics of the company’s close ties to the Trump administration, which Helberg brushes off.

Helberg’s roles at Palantir and on the commission provided launch pads for his campaign to ban TikTok. From 2023 to 2024 he worked Capitol Hill, meeting with dozens of members of Congress trying to persuade them to pass legislation that would outlaw the social media app. Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) credits Helberg’s efforts as instrumental in the passage of the bipartisan legislation in 2024 that required TikTok’s Beijing-based owner ByteDance to sell the app to a non-adversarial buyer or face having it banned from U.S. app stores.

“His engagement,” Cammack says, “basically put the effort on steroids.”

Trump delayed the ban from taking effect five times last year while a deal was negotiated to divest the app to American owners. Both national security experts and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle worry that the agreement doesn’t reduce the vulnerability of the app’s algorithm — and thus its American users — to Chinese government influence.

Helberg himself no longer mentions TikTok.

Ask Helberg about his politics these days and he will tell you, “I am MAGA all the way.” He dismisses its opponents as sufferers of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” They are, he says, adherents of “a philosophy of degrowth that militates the institutionalized hatred and erasure of Western civilization” favored by what he calls “radical far-left groups.”

That’s a dramatic turnaround for a onetime Democratic Party-leaning moderate who in the 2020 election donated to Democratic candidates, according to Forbes. In his 2021 book, The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power, Helberg recounts his starry-eyed praise for Hillary Clinton in an early meeting in 2015 with his then husband-to-be Rabois — whom he describes as a “ruby-red conservative.” Over drinks, Helberg writes, he “spent an hour raving about her,” while Rabois responded by “politely looking at me with a big smile.”

“Keith still hasn't let me live it down,” Helberg says today. But by 2020, Helberg had defected to the GOP, because, he says, the Democratic Party betrayed its core beliefs including free speech and free enterprise.

“I didn't abandon my principles — I followed them out the door,” Helberg says.

He approached his political conversion the way he does everything: by cannonballing into the GOP pool. By 2023, he and Rabois were throwing a fundraiser for then-GOP presidential hopeful Nikki Haley. He’s had company on that journey. “Almost everyone in my family is MAGA at this point,” he says.  

He attributes his support for Trump to what he calls his courageous response to the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. Trump declared the attack “one of the darkest days in all of history” and blamed the “weakness” of the administration of President Joe Biden for emboldening Hamas in a violent spree that killed more than 1,200 Israelis. As an “observant and faithful” Jew with grandparents who went to their graves with the numbered tattoos on their forearms that they received at Auschwitz, October 7 amplified “this intangible awareness that tends to be passed down from generation to generation about the history of persecution and antisemitism,” Helberg recalls.

“Covid made me a Republican,” he says. “October 7 made me an unflinching supporter of this president. The first showed me what happens when a governing class stops trusting its own citizens. The second showed me that when bullets are flying and babies are being burnt alive in ovens, everything comes down to having a president who can see things clearly through the thick fog of the news cycle.”

Helberg now expresses fierce loyalty to Trump who he describes as an underdog who has defeated a political system that sought to destroy him.

“Against all odds, against two assassination attempts, against judicial persecutions — I really believe they were totally unfair trials — he has actually defied everyone in the establishment class of this country,” Helberg says, “and, frankly, the world.”

Since his Google days, Helberg has seen China as an existential threat, and he’s used his short tenure in the State Department to do everything he can to eradicate that threat. Since assuming his position in October, Helberg has wrangled 24 countries to join Pax Silica. That initiative is a re-invention of the Biden administration’s Minerals Security Partnership stripped of that grouping’s emphasis on “clean energy transition,” “consultation with communities” and “ethical business operations.” Instead, Pax Silica leans hard into the pursuit of “mutual economic security” and cooperation against “non-market policies and practices.”

“Helberg personally led talks to push countries to support the declaration,” according to a Washington-based diplomat privy to his country’s Pax Silica negotiations and granted anonymity due to the sensitivity of those discussions.

Taking Pax Silica from a concept to a working coalition in just over eighteen months has required a level of intensity that has defied what Helberg calls “the normal speed of government.”

He has embraced a punishing work schedule, commuting between his homes in Washington, California and Florida (which reportedly includes a $1 million scuba-sized Japanese aquarium) while caring for his son and daughter, who he’s raising with Rabois. Even after a long work day Helberg presents as fresh, unfatigued and with a facial glow that conjures images of pricy nutraceuticals and a religious skin care regimen.

His looks and charm are essential components of his diplomatic toolkit. In an administration that has excelled at insulting and repelling long-time partners and friends, Helberg spearheads an initiative to try to coax them back into alignment with the U.S. His pitch: democratic countries should join the U.S. in a battle to dominate the technologies that will define global power in the 21st century or surrender the future to Beijing.

His pursuit of new partners for the initiative — particularly countries with the raw materials or technological expertise necessary to keep the U.S. ahead of China’s AI development — has him constantly on the move. Over the past year, he’s traveled to more than 18 countries and met with the leaders of more than 40 nations. In May alone those efforts took him to South America, where he made a pitch for greater U.S. access to Guyana’s massive reserves of bauxite and then on to Southeast Asia to seal a deal with the Philippine government for the creation of a 4,000 acre “economic security zone” for AI-related manufacturing.

Pax Silica “is the exact type of thing that Jacob would be able to pull off because he deeply understands funding mechanisms, Congress, how to align public and private capital, and how to bring a lot of allied partners on board,” Asparouhov says.

The Pax Silica Declaration, which doesn’t commit its signers to specific deliverables, is currently more symbolic than substantive as Helberg focuses on building a critical mass of members with the resource muscle needed to back collaborative projects. But it’s a first step in rallying U.S. allies and partners into joint research and development, manufacturing and infrastructure investment projectsintended to rival China’s Belt and Road initiative — which seeks to build a new “Silk Road” linking Africa, Asia and Europe through a vast infrastructure network. Helberg hopes to do something similar with Pax Silica — while providing the U.S. with the materials necessary to dominate the development of AI and quantum computing.

“This grouping of countries will be to the AI age what the G7 was to the industrial age,” Helberg says.

Helberg’s role also includes engagement with the European Commission on perceived unfair treatment of U.S. tech companies, assessment and enforcement of U.S. government sanction regimes against countries including Russia, Iran and Syria and protecting U.S. IT infrastructure. He sees Pax Sicilia as “the overarching framework that ties it together — a platform that lets the United States reshape the strategic environment itself, rather than fight every economic battle on terrain someone else chose.”

Helberg’s vision for Pax Silica’s role in securing U.S. dominance in AI has support on Capitol Hill. House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Brian Mast, a Florida Republican, has warned that a Chinese victory in the AI development race will give Beijing capabilities that could pose existential national security implications. “I have no doubt they are waiting to release the next super Covid if that’s what they could develop. Or a Missile Defense Mythos that can get around any Golden Dome that the United States of America has,” Mast said at a hearing in July.

Beijing senses a threat. Pax Silica aims “at decoupling with China in the semiconductor supply chain, a scenario that disrupts the global supply chain, and through confrontational approach, is set to raise costs for chips and other materials,” the Global Times, a Chinese state media tabloid, reported in December.

It remains to be seen if Pax Silica will deliver on those ambitions. Although the countries who have signed on so far include tech industry heavyweights including Japan, South Korea and Taiwan (a nonsignatory participant), the grouping lacks representation from Group of 7 heavyweights France and Canada. And after Trump’s latest escalation of the trade war with our Northern neighbor, Canada isn’t likely to sign on any time soon. Saudi Arabia, which inked a “Strategic Artificial Intelligence Partnership” with the U.S. last year, has also steered clear of the grouping. Those gaps in the initiative’s ranks may reflect the impact on prospective members of the Trump administration’s often belligerent foreign and trade policy — think Trump’s fondness for tariffsand his threats to acquire Greenland.

“You can't put a knife to the throat of NATO and then create Pax Silica at the same time,” says Eric Robinson, an expert on international supply chains who served as director of the Defense Department's Office of Strategic Capital in the Biden administration.

Some participants also question how the initiative will deliver on its declaration of intent. “It seems mostly symbolic,” the Washington-based diplomat for a country that joined the initiative tells POLITICO Magazine. “There aren’t any solid commitments linked to signing.”

Helberg doesn’t take kindly to public criticism of a project he considers his brainchild. In a post on X in May, French tech entrepreneur Arnaud Bertrand criticized Pax Silica as “structurally neocolonial” because of a proposed clause in the Philippine Pax Silica development contract that would apply U.S. common law rather than Philippine law over the site.

Helberg responded with an X post of his own accusing Bertrand of having “an ignorant loser mentality.” When another online critic described Manila’s rejection of the common law contract clause as Filipinos “rising up against Pax Silica,” Helberg accused them of being part of a group of “failed-commentators-turned-paid-for-mouthpieces.”

He fights back, he says, because he really believes the master key to American prosperity in the 21st century is the U.S. tech sector’s AI dominance over China. And that means overhauling and redirecting State’s economic policy engine into a MAGA-aligned outfit targeting China's growing economic and tech muscle.

“In 2025, Beijing could squeeze the tech supply chains of the U.S. and its partners more or less at will. By 2027, I want that to be measurably no longer true,” Helberg says. “And I want the receipts: signed agreements, groundbreakings, dollars deployed.”

Over the coming year that will involve building out a trio of initiatives aimed at focusing the intentions of Pax Silica members into concrete outcomes. They include the Pax Pass, a specialized cargo shipping platform aimed to ensure fast, secure transfer of goods critical to AI development. Pax Pass will test Helberg’s ability to charm a polarized Congress to provide an initial $50 million in development costs.

In addition, Helberg and his team will also work with Stanford University to create what he calls The Foundry School — a training ground for Pax Silica member technologists in cutting edge advanced manufacturing. Those skills are essential for the success of what Helberg says will be a growing network of “economic security zones” modeled on the development in the Philippines launched in April that he foresees will become the engine rooms of friendly AI-integrated economies.

There’s a reason for the urgency he feels in creating a high tech resource supply and manufacturing pipeline invulnerable to Chinese interference. Soon, he says, there will be “new markets that don't even exist today, that are going to spring about into existence in the years ahead.”

“We are just in the infancy days of the AI revolution.”