A finance employee at the global design firm Arup transferred $25.6 million after joining a video call populated by synthetic replicas of senior executives. The faces looked real. The voices sounded real. The instructions were false.

That incident was not an isolated warning. Starbucks quietly retired an AI inventory system only nine months after deployment, following barista reports that it miscounted products and slowed their work. Deloitte's Australian member firm agreed to partially refund the government for a $290,000 AI-assisted report that cited nonexistent academic sources and included a fabricated court quotation. Different industries, different technologies, but the same root failure: people could not trust the output, the identity, or the system. Regulators have taken notice: the EU AI Act, formally adopted in 2024, imposes tiered obligations on high-risk AI systems, while the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology released its AI Risk Management Framework in 2023 to give organizations a voluntary baseline for evaluating reliability and accountability.

Trust is becoming a form of economic infrastructure. Companies that cannot engineer it will move slower, spend more, and lose markets. When trust is strong, capital flows, partnerships form, and companies scale. When it breaks, transactions slow, compliance and insurance costs rise, and leaders retreat from risk.

Trust is not blind faith. It is earned confidence — confidence that facts are real, identities are authentic, systems are secure, contracts will be honored, and someone will be accountable when things go wrong. In business terms, trust reduces friction. In strategic terms, it creates speed.

America's Original Trust Bet

As America marks its 250th anniversary, it is worth remembering that trust was not a footnote to the founding. It was the bet. In the first three essays of this Freedom & Enterprise series, I described the Declaration of Independence as America's first founding bet, the system it created as one that let people build free, and the freedom to fail as one of our greatest competitive advantages. Beneath all three lies a more fundamental principle: America trusted free people to govern themselves, take risks, honor commitments, and build institutions strong enough to survive disagreement.

For most of history, order was imposed from above because rulers did not trust ordinary people with power. The Declaration reversed that logic. Its signers pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor not only to reject a king, but to trust citizens they would never meet and generations they would never see. That trust became an economic advantage: entrepreneurs could start businesses without royal permission, investors could back ideas because property rights and contracts mattered, and talent could rise on merit. The system was imperfect, but its capacity to correct itself and rebuild confidence became one of America's greatest strengths.

AI Is the New Stress Test

Today, artificial intelligence is testing America's capacity for trust in real time. AI can accelerate science, manufacturing, medicine, logistics, and productivity. It can also fabricate convincing falsehoods, clone an executive's voice, make opaque decisions, and automate errors at extraordinary speed. The FBI has repeatedly warned that cybercriminals are weaponizing generative AI for business email compromise schemes, phishing, and synthetic-media fraud — the same category of attack that cost Arup $25.6 million.

The answer is not to halt AI, but to build trust into it: reliable data, traceable provenance, strong identity controls, independent testing, human accountability, clear rules, and meaningful recourse when systems fail. Innovation without trust stalls at the pilot stage. Innovation with trust becomes infrastructure.

America's strategic competition with China in AI is not simply a race between individual models. It is a competition between entire innovation systems: talent, research, capital, secure infrastructure, resilient supply chains, allied adoption, and commercially superior products. The ecosystem that earns the greatest confidence will attract the most builders, buyers, partners, and investment.

Trust deficits also fragment markets. An IMF analysis estimated that severe geoeconomic fragmentation could reduce global output by as much as 7 percent. That is not an argument for isolation. It is an argument for clarity. That is why I previously argued in Fortune that every board should have a China contingency plan. Every company should understand what it depends on, who controls it, whether its data and technology can be trusted, and what happens if access disappears overnight.

Trust Must Be Designed

I learned this principle in business before I encountered it in diplomacy. At Ariba, we moved procurement from paper and closed systems onto a global digital network. At DocuSign, we asked people to replace the handwritten signature with a digital agreement. Neither transformation could scale on technology alone. Identity, security, reliability, enforceability, and accountability had to be engineered into the product from the start.

I saw the same principle at work as U.S. Under Secretary of State, while leading efforts to secure global 5G networks. The central question was not only who could build them fastest or cheapest, but who could be trusted to carry sensitive data across commerce, finance, health care, energy, transportation, and defense. That question became the foundation of the Clean Network, which grew to encompass 60 nations representing nearly two-thirds of global GDP and more than 200 telecommunications companies.

The same principle now guides the Global Trusted Tech Network at the Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy. For CEOs and boards, trust must be treated as a management discipline, not a communications campaign. Every leadership team should be able to answer four questions: Can we verify who is giving instructions? Can we trace the origin of our data and AI outputs? Do we know our critical technology and supply-chain dependencies? Is accountability clear when a system fails? If the answer to any of these is no, the company does not merely have a reputation problem. It has an operating risk.

America's Next 250 Years

America has rebuilt trust before — imperfectly, and through struggle. The genius of the American system is not unbroken trust. It is the capacity to repair trust through transparency, accountability, competition, the rule of law, a free press, and self-government.

That work is part of the mission of Freedom 250: not only to commemorate the founding, but to renew the principles that made the American experiment possible. The Founders entrusted future generations with the country they risked everything to create. That responsibility now belongs to us.

Freedom is sustained when facts can be verified, identities can be authenticated, contracts are honored, leaders earn confidence, institutions serve the public, and citizens keep faith with one another.

In the age of AI, trust is not the alternative to innovation. It is the condition that allows innovation to scale. America's future will not be secured by replacing trust with control, but by earning it again. Two hundred fifty years ago, America bet everything on trust. We must make that bet pay off again.

Freedom only works when trust does.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.