Every July 4th, Americans are handed sparklers and told to celebrate their freedom. Politicians climb podiums, flags wave, a hundred million dollars’ worth of fireworks scatter across the sky, and somewhere between the hot dogs and the stadium-rock anthems, it becomes easy to confuse the theater of freedom with the substance of it.

It’s no secret that large language models (LLMs) and generative AI have become a massive and critical part of the American and global economy, with the St. Louis Fed reporting that AI accounted for 39 percent of GDP growth in the first three quarters 2025.