As President Donald Trump gears up for a major speech on artificial intelligence, reports are circulating that his long-awaited “AI Action Plan” will soon be revealed.
Soon after taking office, thepresident scrapped Biden-era attempts to regulate AI and called for a new framework to be developed within 180 days. That time has now passed, and the plan should be revealed in the coming weeks.
Trump is bullish on AI and cryptocurrency, and will deliver the keynote address at an AI summit on Wednesday in Washington, D.C., marking his first major address on the topic since retaking the White House in January.
Other Trump administration officials and industry leaders will also attend the conference, including White House “crypto czar” David Sacks, one of the authors of the forthcoming “AI Action Plan.”
“To commence the policies that will make our nation united, fair, safe, and prosperous again, it is the policy of the United States to restore common sense to the federal government and unleash the potential of the American citizen,” says Trump’s Day One order rescinding more than 60 of former President Joe Biden’s decrees, including those relating to AI.
Biden attempted to single-handedly regulate AI through an executive order on Oct. 30, 2023. Titled “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence,” it required AI companies to share key safety information and test results with the federal government before new models were released to the public.
The tech industry opposed Biden’s attempts to control it, and it now enjoys freedom from those restrictions while Trump crafts a framework of his own, which is expected to be much more hands-off. Trump issued another executive order on Jan. 23, titled “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence,” that further rolled back regulations.
This White House appears to be focused on winning the AI race at the international level, so the United States is exporting its technology to places such as Europe and China rather than vice versa, and it sees deregulation as important to achieving that goal.
Even if the Biden framework was seen as heavy-handed or politicized, big questions remain among industry advocates about the potential for runaway superintelligence as AI rapidly advances.
“We think the risks are very real,” said Doug Calidas, vice president of government affairs at Americans for Responsible Innovation.
“These systems are powerful, and if you talk to the people who are developing the systems themselves, including some of the top engineers at the companies that are at the forefront, they’ll say these things are different from technological programs that have been developed before,” Calidas added. “They present novel risks. We don’t exactly know why they do a lot of the things they do, and we see that there have been some strange incidents.”
Among those incidents are AI programs blackmailing their developers when threatened with replacement, strategically lying to users, and, in the case of Elon Musk’s Grok, going haywire and calling itself “MechaHitler.” There are also more mundane problems, such as young students using AI to cheat on their homework.
According to Axios, Trump’s AI plan will span 20 pages and take a relatively lax approach to oversight. It will reportedly promote innovation, reduce regulations, and overhaul permitting, according to the outlet.
The White House last updated the status of the action plan in April, saying it had received more than 10,000 public comments on the proposal.
Daniel Cochrane, a tech policy associate at the Heritage Foundation, hopes that Trump will emphasize his plans to build out the essential infrastructure to outcompete China. Part of that will include energy generation to support power-hungry AI programs, a big focus of last week’s AI and data center summit in Pittsburgh, which Trump attended.
“The administration recognizes that to beat China, we need a permissive regulatory environment that allows for innovation,” Cochrane said, “especially in creating the capacity for the advanced technology that you need to train these frontier models.”
Cochrane added that Trump is limited in how far he can go because he has to work within the bounds of existing laws passed by Congress. He predicted that much of the idea generation for regulatory models will come at the state level for the foreseeable future.
Vice President JD Vance has also been involved in the AI space, memorably giving a speech in Paris in which he praised it as the most promising technology in generations.
“I’m not here this morning to talk about AI safety, which was the title of the conference a couple of years ago,” Vance said. “I’m here to talk about AI opportunity.”
That’s a far cry from Biden, who said, “To realize the promise of AI and avoid the risk, we need to govern this technology” just a few months before.
SIX-MONTH CHECK-UP ON TRUMP’S ECONOMY: INFLATION AND GAS PRICES DOWN, BUT CONSUMERS STILL NERVOUS
However, Calidas expects this won’t be the last we hear from Trump about AI, either. He said the rapid pace of its advancement means things could look much different by the time the president’s term ends in early 2029.
“I don’t think that this is their last word on AI,” he said. “This is one action they’re taking, which we think is going to be largely deregulatory. But there’s another three-and-a-half years left in his term, which is a long time for the technology to develop. We wouldn’t be surprised if they take some actions to address it. We’re certainly hoping so.”
