Proposals include reducing regulations and environmental permitting but also carry on a few Biden policies. ‘We will not allow any foreign nation to beat us’ on AI, Trump says.
Just over six months after dragging the Biden administration’s AI agenda to the trash, the Trump administration announced its own set of policies to accelerate the progress of AI.
Where President Biden’s 2023 executive order on AI and 2022 AI Bill of Rights emphasized deploying AI safely, Trump’s “Winning the AI Race: America’s AI Action Plan” stresses developing it faster than the rest of the world.
“America is going to win it,” Trump said in a roughly 50-minute speech in Washington on Wednesday evening. “We will not allow any foreign nation to beat us.”
That 28-page document begins by directing various federal offices to seek input and look for regulations and policies that might impede AI development. It further invites the Federal Communications Commission to see if state-level AI regulations interfere with its own work, although software is well outside the FCC’s normal regulatory scope.
The plan’s opening pages also call on the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to “eliminate references to misinformation, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and climate change” from the AI Risk Management Framework that it developed in response to Biden’s EO. Trump trash-talked that as a plan that “never would have worked.”
After the speech, Trump signed an executive order banning “Woke AI” from federal systems, which the EO defines as “when ideological biases or social agendas are built into AI models” and “distort the quality and accuracy of the output.”
Subsequent paragraphs in the plan address a series of AI development issues. It endorses such actions as encouraging “open-weight” and open-source AI models over closed systems; working to develop markets for short-term purchases of data center computing power; boosting workforce training; and having government agencies help create “world-class” datasets to train AI models.
