Only predictive capabilities & AI trained on data can be more valuable than having perfect profile of the person who turns out to be an enemy of your nation in whatever sense. Taking a person down once you know everyone they have ever talked, been interested about, or thought, is trivial. This can only be acheived by mass surveillance & hoarding.

Arguably US as a nation state has the very best LLMs in the world, which is why I personally think they have been running weak AGI for few years, e.g. for autonomous malware analysis, reverse-engineering, and tailored malware generation & testing capability. Because they can actually store the personal data long term, without habing to delete it, this may be of gigantic strategic advantage due web being highly "polluted" after 2020-2021.

I would from this guess US has bet on AI research since end of WWII, and especially within last 30 years, noting the rather highly remarkable possibility that Surveillance Capitalism is actually part of the nation's security effforts. The warehouses of data they have built are warehouses of gold, or rather, gold mixed in sand since of course lots of it is also garbage.