Shiva Stella, Public Knowledge; President Trump’s AI Action Plan Misses the Mark, Calls for Action Without Vision
"Today, the Trump administration announced its artificial intelligence action plan designed to “accelerate AI innovation” – by stepping aside and giving technology companies free rein over how the technology develops. The plan removes state and federal regulatory requirements, eliminates protections against bias and discrimination, fails to address competition concerns, and ignores climate and environmental risks.
The plan does continue to advance important work on developing an AI evaluation ecosystem and supporting critical research on AI interpretability, control, security risks, and advancing the fundamental science of AI. However, these modest steps throw into stark contrast the failure to meaningfully invest in America’s AI future.
Public Knowledge argues that real AI innovation will require real leadership from our democratically elected leaders, investments and actions that break down monopolies and corporate control, and public trust earned by creating AI systems that are safe, fair, and subject to the rule of law...
The following can be attributed to Nicholas Garcia, Senior Policy Counsel at Public Knowledge:
“This plan is action without vision or direction. Cutting regulations and eliminating protections is, by itself, not a plan for innovation and competition in AI – it is a handout to already-entrenched, powerful tech companies. The real constraints on AI innovation are well-known: access to training data, compute power, and research talent. This plan’s solutions in those areas are severely lacking. At its heart, the plan is starkly divided between political posturing and serious science.
“It is clear that some of the experts’ messages from the public comments reached the White House. Continuing to develop an AI evaluation ecosystem; investing in research on AI interpretability and control; promoting the development and use of open-source and open-weights models; and claiming an international leadership position on evaluating AI national security risks are all critically important policy pursuits.
“President Trump also spoke strongly in his speech tonight about the need to protect the rights to read and learn. He is absolutely correct about the need to protect those fundamental rights for everyone, including for AI training. Unfortunately, there is no mention of how to protect these rights or address questions about copyright in the AI action plan.
“Instead of focusing more deeply on research or promoting competition, the AI action plan continues the Trump administration’s attack on diversity and equality, on the green energy solutions needed to both protect our planet and power AI, and on the very institutions of science and learning that are necessary to secure the promise of AI. This demonstrates how the vindictive political project of ‘preventing woke’ directly clashes with achieving actual leadership in AI.
“Ultimately, the plan’s soaring and optimistic language of AI acceleration is undermined by a failure to embrace an affirmative vision of how AI will improve the lives of everyday Americans and how to actually get there. We can only hope that these small steps in the right direction on evaluations, research, and open-source – along with the administration’s remarks on copyright – means that there is more to come to ensure that the American people are the winners of the AI race. As it stands right now, this plan fails to meet the challenges of this pivotal moment.”
You may view our recent blog post, “Hopes and Fears for President Trump’s AI Action Plan,” for more information."