Donald Trump just laid out his vision for AI policy
The president wants to help American AI companies compete with their Chinese rivals.
The Biden administration often seemed ambivalent about AI. In a 2023 executive order, Joe Biden declared that irresponsible use of AI could “exacerbate societal harms such as fraud, discrimination, bias, and disinformation; displace and disempower workers; stifle competition; and pose risks to national security.”
On Wednesday, the Trump administration released an AI Action Plan with a very different tone.
“Winning the AI race will usher in a new golden age of human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security for the American people,” the document said.
In a speech later that day, Trump vowed to use every policy lever to keep the United States on the cutting edge.
“To ensure America maintains the world-class infrastructure we need to win, today I will sign a sweeping executive order to fast-track federal permitting, streamline reviews, and do everything possible to expedite construction of all major AI infrastructure projects,” Trump said.
“The last administration was obsessed with imposing restrictions on AI, including extreme restrictions on its exports,” Trump said. Trump touted his earlier decision to cancel the diffusion rule, a Biden-era policy that tried to regulate data centers in third countries in order to prevent Chinese companies from using American chips.
In a surprise move, Trump’s speech argued that AI companies should be allowed to train their models on copyrighted material without permission from rights holders. The issue, which is currently being hashed out in court, was not mentioned in the written AI Action Plan.
In short, the Biden administration aimed to strictly control AI in order to prevent harmful uses and contain China. The Trump administration, in contrast, wants to unleash American AI companies so they can compete more effectively with their Chinese rivals.
“This plan sees AI as a giant opportunity for America and is optimistic about what it can do,” said Neil Chilson, a policy expert at the right-of-center Abundance Institute. “It's pretty concrete on a wide range of things the federal government can do to make that happen.”
Republicans don’t all love Silicon Valley
It’s common for reporters like me to write about “the Trump administration,” but of course that isn’t a monolithic entity. Below the president are dozens of White House staffers and thousands of officials across the federal government who are involved in crafting and executing government policies.
Often these people disagree with one another. And sometimes that means that what an administration actually does is different from what it said it was going to do. That’s especially true under Donald Trump, a mercurial president who isn’t known for his attention to detail. So when interpreting a document like the AI Action Plan, it’s helpful to know the context in which it is written.
The AI Action Plan was drafted by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and signed by its director, Michael Kratsios. Kratsios is a protégé of Peter Thiel and a former executive of the AI startup Scale.1 The Action Plan was cosigned by White House AI advisor David Sacks, a venture capitalist and a member (along with Peter Thiel) of the PayPal Mafia.2
In short, Trump’s AI plan was shaped by Silicon Valley insiders who have a favorable view of AI companies. But not everyone in the Republican Party is so friendly to either the AI industry or Silicon Valley more broadly.
One area of ongoing tension has been over state-level regulation. When Congress was debating the One Big Beautiful Bill Act last month, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) proposed an amendment that would have prohibited states from regulating AI for ten years. But other senators with reputations as Silicon Valley critics, including Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), opposed Cruz’s language. The Senate ultimately stripped Cruz’s amendment from the bill in a 99-1 vote.
The AI Action Plan includes a watered-down version of the same rule. It directs federal agencies awarding AI-related funding to states to “consider a state’s AI regulatory climate when making funding decisions.” In theory, this could lead to states with stricter AI laws losing federal grants, but it’s not clear how much AI-related funding federal agencies actually hand out.
How much this language matters could depend on who runs the agencies that actually implement the directive—and specifically whether they agree more with tech industry allies like Cruz and Sacks or critics like Hawley and Blackburn.
It’s a similar story with the most widely discussed provision of the Action Plan: a rule requiring the federal government to only pay for AI models that are “objective and free from top-down ideological bias.” Trump also signed an executive order laying out the administration’s approach in more detail.
It was probably inevitable that Trump’s AI plan would include language like this, but the authors of the executive order seemed to be trying hard to limit its impact. The rule requires only that government-purchased LLMs be free of ideological bias. It does not require a company to make all of its models ideologically neutral if it wants to compete for federal contracts—a rule that would have raised more serious constitutional issues.
Model providers will also have an option to comply with the rule by being “transparent about ideological judgments through disclosure of the LLM’s system prompt, specifications, evaluations, or other relevant documentation.” So AI companies may not have to actually change their models in order to be eligible for federal contracts.
Still, Matt Mittelsteadt, an AI policy researcher at the libertarian Cato Institute, called the “woke AI” provision a “big mistake.”
“They're going to use their procurement power to try and push model developers in a certain political direction,” he said in a Thursday phone interview.
The executive order mentions an infamous 2024 incident in which Google’s AI model generated images of female popes and black Founding Fathers. But Mittelsteadt pointed out that it doesn’t mention the more recent incident in which Grok posted a series of antisemitic rants to X and endorsed Adolf Hitler’s ability to “deal with” “anti-white hate.” Indeed, the Department of Defense awarded a contract to Grok worth up to $200 million just days after Grok’s antisemitic tirades.
“I'm worried other countries are going to start viewing our models like we view China's models,” Mittelsteadt added. “Nobody wants to use a model that's seen as a propaganda tool.”
A technocratic wish list
Although Trump’s AI Action Plan has very different vibes than the Biden order that preceded it, there’s more continuity between administrations than you might expect.
“So much of this did not feel like a far cry from a potential Harris administration,” Mittelsteadt said.
The AI Action Plan proposes:
Funding scientific research into AI models—as well as computing infrastructure to support such research
Providing training to workers impacted by AI
Promoting the use of AI by government
Improving information sharing to combat cybersecurity threats created by AI
Beefing up export controls to hamper China’s AI progress
Promoting semiconductor manufacturing in the United States
Enhancing and expanding the electric grid to support power-hungry AI efforts
Most AI-related policy issues are not especially partisan. All of the ideas on the list above have supporters across the ideological spectrum. But the way Republicans and Democrats justify these policies can be quite different.
The electric grid is an interesting example here. The Biden administration sought to upgrade the electric grid to enable electrification and combat climate change. The Trump administration, in contrast, vows to “reject radical climate dogma.” But it still wants to upgrade the electric grid because AI requires a lot of electricity.
In addition to upgrading the electric grid, the AI Action Plan calls for embracing “new energy generation sources at the technological frontier (e.g., enhanced geothermal, nuclear fission, and nuclear fusion).” Solar and wind are conspicuously absent from this list because those power sources have become politically polarized. But geothermal and nuclear power are also zero-carbon energy sources.
In short, the AI Action Plan could easily aid in decarbonization efforts despite the Trump administration’s avowed disinterest in that goal.
Indeed, I can easily imagine Trump’s administration being more successful at upgrading America’s electrical infrastructure because Republicans are likely to be ruthless about cutting the red tape that often holds back new construction. During the Biden years, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) championed legislation that would have fast-tracked improvements to the electric grid. But the bill never got across the finish line. Rebranding this as a matter of AI competitiveness might give it broader support.
In 2022, Joe Biden signed the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act, which provided subsidies to encourage companies to build chip fabs in the United States. Trump has blasted the CHIPS Act as “horrible” and called for its repeal, but his new AI Action Plan calls for the CHIPS Program Office (created by the act) to “continue focusing on delivering a strong return on investment for the American taxpayer and removing all extraneous policy requirements for CHIPS-funded semiconductor manufacturing projects.”
Once again, it’s easy to imagine a Republican administration being more effective here. In a 2023 piece for the New York Times, liberal columnist Ezra Klein used the CHIPS Act as an example in his critique of “everything-bagel liberalism”: Democrats’ tendency to lard up worthwhile programs with so many extraneous requirements—from minority set-asides to child care access for construction workers—that they become ineffective at their core mission.
By stripping out “extraneous policy requirements,” the Trump administration may be more effective at using chip subsidies to actually promote domestic chip manufacturing.
Trump has a tendency to change his mind
Still, everything can change depending on who catches the ear of the president. A few weeks ago, Sen. Hawley asked Donald Trump to cancel a federal loan guarantee for the Grain Belt Express, an $11 billion transmission line that is supposed to carry electricity from Kansas wind farms to homes in Illinois and Indiana. The proposed line would pass through Hawley’s state of Missouri, annoying farmers whose land would be taken by eminent domain.
According to the New York Times, Hawley “explained his concerns to the president, who has repeatedly expressed his distaste for wind power, saying he would not permit any new wind projects during his administration.” Trump then called Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who agreed to cancel a federal loan guarantee for the project, throwing its viability into question.
“Their apparent plan to try to muck up the gears of solar and wind really is counter to the goal of modernizing the grid and ensuring reliability and access to energy,” Cato’s Matt Mittelsteadt told me.
Something similar has happened with export controls. The Trump administration includes China hawks who favor strict export controls to hamper the development of Chinese AI technology. But other administration officials believe it’s more important to promote the export of American technology, including semiconductors, around the world. There’s an inherent tension between these objectives, and the AI Action Plan seems to reflect a compromise between these factions. It simultaneously advocates promoting the sale of American AI to US allies (Trump signed a stand-alone executive order laying out a plan to do this) and strengthening the US export control regime.
The AI Action Plan has an “emphasis on the need for the world to adopt the American AI stack,” according to Neil Chilson of the Abundance Institute. “That is in some tension with export controls, and so it will be interesting to see how they try to square that.”
In April, the Trump administration banned Nvidia from selling the H20—a GPU whose capabilities were deliberately limited to comply with Biden-era export controls—to China. But then a few weeks ago, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang “met with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office and pressed his case for restarting sales of his specialized chips.” His arguments persuaded Trump, who allowed Nvidia to resume Chinese exports days later.
So a lot depends on which issues catch Donald Trump’s attention—and how those issues are framed for him. If he can be persuaded that a policy is intended to promote diversity or combat climate change, he’s likely to block it. On the other hand, if it promotes American dominance of the AI sector, he’s likely to support it. Because we never know who Trump will meet with next or what they will talk about, it’s hard to predict how the government’s policies might change from month to month.
A note for my fellow journalists: My former boss, Ars Technica editor-in-chief Ken Fisher, is co-hosting an event for journalists on July 30 at OpenAI’s New York headquarters. Almost a year after Condé Nast signed a deal with OpenAI, executives from the two companies (including Nick Turley, Anna Makanju, and Kate Rouch from OpenAI) will chat about the latest in LLMs—the technology, adoption patterns, and potential use cases. The event is open to members of the press and will run from 2 to 5pm. To RSVP, email events@arstechnica.com.
Kratsios hired Dean Ball, the former co-host of my podcast AI Summer, to do AI policy work at OSTP.
The third co-author was Marco Rubio, Secretary of State and Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.
Trump: "To ensure America maintains the world-class infrastructure we need to win, today I will sign a sweeping executive order to fast-track federal permitting, streamline reviews, and do everything possible to expedite construction of all major AI infrastructure projects".
Not a huge fan of Trump and his policies, but he's absolutely right about the importance of energy and AI dominance.
The boosterism and lack of caution is alarming, but I suppose it is gratifying to some of Trump's patrons. Tit for tat, right?