Trump Releases His All-American Action Plan for AI

Donald Trump on Wednesday revealed “America’s AI Action Plan,” a collection of more than 90 policy recommendations designed to ensure that the country remains competitive when it comes to the development of artificial intelligence, some of which would loosen regulations around the development of data centers and encourage rapid adoption of the technology across different sectors. “We believe we’re in an AI race,” David Sacks, the White House AI czar, said during a call with reporters. “We want the United States to win that race.”

The 23-page plan is broken down into three primary pillars that the Trump administration sees as key to speeding up AI development: “Accelerate AI Innovation,” “Build American AI Infrastructure,” and “Lead in International AI Diplomacy and Security.” Trump plans to get the ball rolling on the plan by signing several executive orders on Wednesday, per Bloomberg, including a directive to use the US International Development Finance Corporation and the Export-Import Bank to encourage American technology be deployed globally and another that will require any large language models used by the federal government to be neutral and “unbiased.”

What Trump’s plan primarily amounts to is rolling back regulations. For instance, the report calls to “reject radical climate dogma and bureaucratic red tape” that it believes will interfere with expanding AI infrastructure, including building data centers and new power plants to support them, plants that Trump has already declared are a-okay to be coal-powered.

The administration is also using the plan to get its say on state-level AI laws, since its attempt to pass a 10-year ban on states passing their own regulations for AI got stripped from the One Big, Beautiful Bill. Within the plan, there is a call to withhold federal funding from any state that enacts “burdensome AI regulations.” Given the lack of detail as to what amounts to a burden, the administration will surely flex that muscle at will. The plan calls for siccing the Federal Communications Commission on the states by putting the agency in charge of evaluating “whether state AI regulations interfere with the agency’s ability to carry out its obligations and authorities
under the Communications Act of 1934.”

There is also a fair amount of undoing what little AI policy came before within the “Action Plan.” While the Biden administration only issued a single executive order related to AI, it did start ramping up federal agencies to address potential concerns related to the new technology. That seems to be over now. Trump’s plan calls for reviewing all Federal Trade Commission investigations initiated by the Biden administration to make sure they “do not advance theories of liability that unduly burden AI innovation.” The Trump administration also plans to revisit the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s AI Risk Management Framework to “eliminate references to misinformation, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and climate change.”

The Action Plan does call on AI models to be open-sourced, so that’s nice. But the rest of the plan seems to be carte blanche for AI companies to do as they see fit, with few requirements or regulations to protect the public. It also shows little interest from the federal government in looking into what potential harm that it might cause.