Trump’s AI strategy trades guardrails for growth in race against China

The Trump administration has officially unveiled its highly anticipated AI Action Plan, signaling a decisive departure from former President Biden’s more cautious stance on artificial intelligence risks. This new roadmap aggressively champions the expansion of AI infrastructure, deregulation for tech companies, bolstered national security, and an intensified competition with China. The policy shift is expected to have far-reaching implications across various industries and for the average American consumer.

Notably, the AI Action Plan de-emphasizes harm mitigation, instead prioritizing the rapid construction of data centers essential for powering the AI industry. This includes provisions for utilizing federal lands and ensuring power supply during critical energy grid periods, even at the expense of environmental considerations. While the plan provides a clear direction—prioritizing progress above all—many implementation details remain to be ironed out. The administration frames this approach as the only path to “usher in a new golden age of human flourishing,” aiming to justify significant taxpayer investment in data center development. Elements of the plan also suggest initiatives for worker upskilling and partnerships with local governments to create jobs linked to data center operations.

“To secure our future, we must harness the full power of American innovation,” stated former President Trump in a statement. “To do that, we will continue to reject radical climate dogma and bureaucratic red tape, as the Administration has done since Inauguration Day. Simply put, we need to ‘Build, Baby, Build!’” The plan was authored by a team of technology and AI specialists from Silicon Valley, including Office of Science and Technology Policy director Michael Kratsios, AI and crypto czar David Sacks, and assistant to the president for national security affairs Marco Rubio. Over 10,000 interest groups contributed public comments to its formulation.

Deregulation and the AI Moratorium Debate

Earlier this month, the U.S. Senate removed a contentious provision from the budget bill that would have imposed a ten-year moratorium on state-level AI regulation, tying compliance to federal broadband funding. However, the AI Action Plan indicates this issue is far from resolved. The plan seeks to impede state AI regulations through new means, threatening to limit federal funding for states based on their AI policy choices. Additionally, it directs the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to assess whether state AI regulations interfere with the agency’s ability to fulfill its mandates, potentially allowing FCC intervention in state laws related to radio, TV, and internet that touch upon AI.

At the federal level, the Office of Science and Technology Policy is tasked with soliciting feedback from businesses and the public on existing federal regulations that might impede AI innovation and adoption, paving the way for further deregulation by federal agencies.

Streamlining Data Center Construction

Trump’s commitment to deregulation extends to accelerating the development of AI-related infrastructure, including data centers, semiconductor fabs, and power sources. The administration contends that current environmental regulations, such as NEPA, the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act, hinder America’s ability to meet the escalating demands of the AI arms race. To this end, the AI Action Plan emphasizes stabilizing America’s energy grid and exploring mechanisms to help large power consumers, like AI companies, manage their consumption during critical grid periods. This comes amidst criticism of companies like xAI and Meta for allegedly concentrating pollution in vulnerable communities, with xAI facing accusations of bypassing environmental safeguards with its Memphis data center.

The plan proposes creating categorical exclusions, streamlining permitting processes, and expanding fast-track programs like FAST-41 to ease the construction of critical AI infrastructure, particularly on federal lands, which include national parks, protected wilderness areas, and military bases. Consistent with broader Trump administration themes, the strategy also prioritizes securing the U.S. supply chain by limiting access for foreign technology and emphasizing protections against “adversarial technology,” such as Chinese-made chips and hardware.

Addressing “Biased AI” and Free Speech

A notable aspect of Trump’s AI Action Plan is its focus on safeguarding free speech and “American values” by removing references to misinformation, DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), and climate change from federal AI risk-assessment frameworks. The plan asserts, “It is essential that these systems be built from the ground up with freedom of speech and expression in mind, and that U.S. government policy does not interfere with that objective.” It aims to ensure that AI procured by the federal government “objectively reflects truth rather than social engineering agendas.”

Despite this stated intention, the plan’s recommended policy actions could have significant implications for freedom of speech. One suggestion is to update federal procurement guidelines to mandate that the government only contracts with frontier large language model developers who “ensure their systems are objective and free from top-down ideological bias.” This language echoes earlier reports by The Wall Street Journal concerning a potential executive order from Trump. The challenge lies in defining and achieving this objectivity, as the government has yet to establish clear evaluation criteria for neutrality.

According to Rumman Chowdhury, a data scientist and former U.S. science envoy for AI, “The only way to be neutral would be literal non-engagement.” The implications are particularly relevant given that companies like Anthropic, xAI, Google, and OpenAI have already secured government contracts worth up to $200 million each to integrate AI applications into the Department of Defense. Legal scholars like Eugene Volokh note that while an order banning contracts with “non-neutral” AI models might face First Amendment challenges, one instructing agencies to prioritize AIs based on a combination of accuracy and neutrality, with some agency latitude, could be more constitutionally defensible, though implementation remains complex.

Fostering an Open Approach to AI

The Trump AI Action Plan seeks to encourage the development and adoption of open AI models, which are freely available online and designed with “American values” in mind. This appears to be a direct response to the proliferation of open AI models emerging from Chinese labs, such as DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen. The plan aims to provide startups and researchers working on open models with access to large computing clusters—resources typically only accessible through multi-million dollar contracts with cloud providers. Furthermore, Trump’s plan proposes partnering with leading AI model developers to enhance the research community’s access to private AI models and data. American AI companies and organizations that have embraced an open approach, including Meta, AI2, and Hugging Face, stand to benefit from this policy shift.

AI Safety and National Security

While prioritizing growth, Trump’s AI Action Plan does include provisions to address concerns from the AI safety community. These efforts involve launching a federal technological development program dedicated to researching AI interpretability, AI control systems, and adversarial robustness. The plan also directs federal agencies, including the Department of Defense and Department of Energy, to host hackathons to rigorously test their AI systems for security vulnerabilities. The document acknowledges the risks of AI systems contributing to cyberattacks and the development of chemical and biological weapons. It calls upon frontier AI model developers to collaborate with federal agencies in evaluating these risks and assessing their potential impact on America’s national security. Compared to Biden’s executive order on AI, Trump’s plan places less emphasis on mandatory safety and security reporting by leading AI model developers, a task often deemed “onerous” by tech companies.

Limiting China and Bolstering National Security

True to form, the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan integrates its broader strategy regarding China into the AI race. A significant portion of the plan focuses on preventing “national security” threats from accessing advanced AI technology. Under this plan, federal agencies will collaborate to gather intelligence on foreign frontier AI projects that could jeopardize American national security. The Department of Commerce, for instance, is tasked with evaluating Chinese AI models for alignment with Chinese Communist Party talking points and censorship. These groups will also conduct assessments on the level of AI adoption among America’s adversaries.

The term “National security” appears 23 times in the AI Action Plan, highlighting its central role—more frequently than “data centers,” “jobs,” or “science.” The plan’s national security strategy centers on integrating AI into the U.S. defense and intelligence apparatus, including establishing AI data centers for the Department of Defense, while simultaneously safeguarding against foreign threats. Among its directives, the plan mandates the DoD and intelligence community to regularly assess U.S. AI adoption against rivals like China and adapt accordingly, and to evaluate risks posed by both domestic and adversarial AI systems. Within the DoD itself, the strategy stresses upskilling the military workforce, automating workflows, and securing preferential access to compute resources during national emergencies.