A number of the executive orders and announcements coming from the White House since Donald Trump returned to office have painted an ambitious vision for America’s AI future—crushing competition with China, abolishing “woke” AI models that suppress conservative speech, jump-starting power-hungry AI data centers. But the details have been sparse.
The White House’s AI Action Plan, released last week, is meant to fix that. Many of the points in the plan won’t come as a surprise, and you’ve probably heard of the big ones by now. Trump wants to boost the buildout of data centers by slashing environmental rules; withhold funding from states that pass “burdensome AI regulations”; and contract only with AI companies whose models are “free from top-down ideological bias.”
But if you dig deeper, certain parts of the plan that didn’t pop up in any headlines reveal more about where the administration’s AI plans are headed. Here are three of the most important issues to watch.
Trump is escalating his fight with the Federal Trade Commission
When Americans get scammed, they’re supposed to be helped by the Federal Trade Commission. As I wrote last week, the FTC under President Biden increasingly targeted AI companies that overhyped the accuracy of their systems, as well as deployments of AI it found to have harmed consumers.
The Trump plan vows to take a fresh look at all the FTC actions under the previous administration as part of an effort to get rid of “onerous” regulation that it claims is hampering AI’s development. The administration may even attempt to repeal some of the FTC’s actions entirely. This would weaken a major AI watchdog agency, but it’s just the latest in the Trump administration’s escalating attacks on the FTC. Read more in my story.
The White House is very optimistic about AI for science
The opening to the AI Action Plan describes a future where AI is doing everything from discovering new materials and drugs to “unraveling ancient scrolls once thought unreadable” to making breakthroughs in science and math.
That type of unbounded optimism about AI for scientific discovery echoes what tech companies are promising. Some of that optimism is grounded in reality: AI’s role in predicting protein structures has indeed led to material scientific wins (and just last week, Google DeepMind released a new AI meant to help interpret ancient Latin engravings). But the idea that large language models—essentially very good text prediction machines—will act as scientists in their own right has less merit so far.
Still, the plan shows that the Trump administration wants to award money to labs trying to make it a reality, even as it has worked to slash the funding the National Science Foundation makes available to human scientists, some of whom are now struggling to complete their research.
And some of the steps the plan proposes are likely to be welcomed by researchers, like funding to build AI systems that are more transparent and interpretable.
The White House’s messaging on deepfakes is confused
Compared with President Biden’s executive orders on AI, the new action plan is mostly devoid of anything related to making AI safer.
However, there’s a notable exception: a section in the plan that takes on the harms posed by deepfakes. In May, Trump signed legislation to protect people from nonconsensual sexually explicit deepfakes, a growing concern for celebrities and everyday people alike as generative video gets more advanced and cheaper to use. The law had bipartisan support.
Now, the White House says it’s concerned about the issues deepfakes could pose for the legal system. For example, it says, “fake evidence could be used to attempt to deny justice to both plaintiffs and defendants.” It calls for new standards for deepfake detection and asks the Department of Justice to create rules around it. Legal experts I’ve spoken with are more concerned with a different problem: Lawyers are adopting AI models that make errors such as citing cases that don’t exist, which judges may not catch. This is not addressed in the action plan.
It’s also worth noting that just days before releasing a plan that targets “malicious deepfakes,” President Trump shared a fake AI-generated video of former president Barack Obama being arrested in the Oval Office.
Overall, the AI Action Plan affirms what President Trump and those in his orbit have long signaled: It’s the defining social and political weapon of our time. They believe that AI, if harnessed correctly, can help them win everything from culture wars to geopolitical conflicts. The right AI, they argue, will help defeat China. Government pressure on leading companies can force them to purge “woke” ideology from their models.
The plan includes crowd-pleasers—like cracking down on deepfakes—but overall, it reflects how tech giants have cozied up to the Trump administration. The fact that it contains almost no provisions challenging their power shows how their investment in this relationship is paying off.
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here.
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