President Trump’s AI Action Plan Misses the Mark, Calls for Action Without Vision; Public Knowledge, July 23, 2025

 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."

Donald Trump Is Fairy-Godmothering AI; The Atlantic, July 23, 2025

 Matteo Wong , The Atlantic; Donald Trump Is Fairy-Godmothering AI

"In a sense, the action plan is a bet. AI is already changing a number of industries, including software engineering, and a number of scientific disciplines. Should AI end up producing incredible prosperity and new scientific discoveries, then the AI Action Plan may well get America there faster simply by removing any roadblocks and regulations, however sensible, that would slow the companies down. But should the technology prove to be a bubble—AI products remain error-prone, extremely expensive to build, and unproven in many business applications—the Trump administration is more rapidly pushing us toward the bust. Either way, the nation is in Silicon Valley’s hands...

Once the red tape is gone, the Trump administration wants to create a “dynamic, ‘try-first’ culture for AI across American industry.” In other words, build and test out AI products first, and then determine if those products are actually helpful—or if they pose any risks.

Trump gestured toward other concessions to the AI industry in his speech. He specifically targeted intellectual-property laws, arguing that training AI models on copyrighted books and articles does not infringe upon copyright because the chatbots, like people, are simply learning from the content. This has been a major conflict in recent years, with more than 40 related lawsuits filed against AI companies since 2022. (The Atlantic is suing the AI company Cohere, for example.) If courts were to decide that training AI models with copyrighted material is against the law, it would be a major setback for AI companies. In their official recommendations for the AI Action Plan, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google all requested a copyright exception, known as “fair use,” for AI training. Based on his statements, Trump appears to strongly agree with this position, although the AI Action Plan itself does not reference copyright and AI training.

Also sprinkled throughout the AI Action Plan are gestures toward some MAGA priorities. Notably, the policy states that the government will contract with only AI companies whose models are “free from top-down ideological bias”—a reference to Sacks’s crusade against “woke” AI—and that a federal AI-risk-management framework should “eliminate references to misinformation, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and climate change.” Trump signed a third executive order today that, in his words, will eliminate “woke, Marxist lunacy” from AI models...

Looming over the White House’s AI agenda is the threat of Chinese technology getting ahead. The AI Action Plan repeatedly references the importance of staying ahead of Chinese AI firms, as did the president’s speech: “We will not allow any foreign nation to beat us; our nation will not live in a planet controlled by the algorithms of the adversaries,” Trump declared...

But whatever happens on the international stage, hundreds of millions of Americans will feel more and more of generative AI’s influence—on salaries and schools, air quality and electricity costs, federal services and doctor’s offices. AI companies have been granted a good chunk of their wish list; if anything, the industry is being told that it’s not moving fast enough. Silicon Valley has been given permission to accelerate, and we’re all along for the ride."