Under a new president, the United States reversed its approach to AI regulation, seeking global dominance by reducing restrictions.
What’s new: President Trump, who took office last week, signed an executive order that set a 180-day deadline to draft an AI Action Plan. The order aims to boost national security, economic competitiveness, and U.S. leadership in artificial intelligence.
How it works: The executive order assigns responsibility for crafting the AI Action Plan to three key figures in the administration: Michael Kratsios, assistant to the president for science and technology (and former managing director of Scale AI); venture capitalist David Sacks, the new special advisor for AI and cryptocurrency; and national security advisor Michael Waltz.
- The AI Action Plan must “sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance in order to promote human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security.”
- The order directs agency heads to suspend or eliminate policies created under President Biden’s 2023 executive order, which President Trump revoked, that may conflict with advancing U.S. AI dominance and national security.
- U.S. companies are to develop AI systems “free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas,” reflecting the administration’s belief that AI systems encode liberal political biases.
- The order directs the federal Office of Management and Budget to award government contracts to AI companies that align with the administration’s emphasis on advancing U.S. competitiveness and national security.
- Most provisions leave significant discretion to the team that will draft the action plan, making their interpretation and implementation open-ended.
AI infrastructure build-out: Along with the executive order, President Trump announced Stargate, a joint venture that involves OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank. The three companies outlined a plan to invest $100 billion in computing infrastructure for AI, such as next-generation data centers, and $500 billion over four years. In addition, the administration declared a national energy emergency with respect to U.S. supplies of energy and issued an order to ramp up domestic energy production. These measures aim to support energy-intensive AI initiatives like Stargate by removing regulatory barriers to building oil, gas, and renewable energy projects on federal lands.
Why it matters: The Trump administration says that Biden’s 2023 regulations were “onerous and unnecessary,” stifled innovation, and jeopardized U.S. leadership in AI. The new order reduces bureaucratic oversight of AI development, creating a more permissive regulatory environment (except when it comes to ideological bias).
We’re thinking: The Biden administration’s 2023 executive order aimed to guard against hypothetical, rather than actual, AI risks. It introduced thresholds of processing used to train models as a measure of their risk — a poorly thought-out proxy. To be fair, the AI Safety Institute under the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology didn’t hamper AI progress as much as some had feared, but overall the order was not helpful to AI innovation or safety. We’re pleased that the new administration is focusing on AI progress rather than hypothetical risks.