Trump Cleans Up AI Policy to Beat China
By Rebecca Grant: AI is at the top of President Donald J. Trump’s priorities for his second term, and he’s starting by cleaning house. Fulfilling a campaign pledge, on January 20, the White House revoked the October 30, 2023, Executive Order on AI signed by President Joe Biden.
The next steps are to develop an AI Action Plan led by Assistant to the President for Science and Technology Michael Kratsios, AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks, and National Security Adviser Michael Waltz. All the OMB memoranda on AI acquisition and governance will be revised or reissued. Trump also said he would use emergency declarations to fast-track power plants collocated with new AI data centers.
Where Biden saw AI dangers to Americans, Trump has rightly called out the dangers of government overreach. “American development of AI systems must be free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas. With the right government policies, the United States can solidify its position as the leader in AI and secure a brighter future for all Americans,” the Jan. 23 release explained.
The White House said the 2023 Biden order “hampered the private sector’s ability to innovate in AI by imposing government control over AI development and deployment.” For example, the Biden order required developers of certain AI systems to run and share safety tests with the US government under authority from the Defense Production Act. That policy is now “Page 404 not Found” on the new White House website, but this link from Brookings summarizes it.
Trump released the first-ever executive action on AI in 2019, and the importance of AI has only grown.
The team crafting Trump’s AI Action Plan has a lot to consider. The Biden Administration’s strategy relied on export controls to prevent China from obtaining the most powerful chips from Nvidia and others needed to train AI models.
However, China’s DeepSeek, an open AI model released on January 10, claims it used less-capable chips to train models and was built cheaply. DeepSeek overtook ChatGPT on the Apple Store on Jan. 27. Reuters said, “DeepSeek has left a deep impression on Silicon Valley, upending widely held views about U.S. primacy in AI and the effectiveness of Washington’s export controls targeting China’s advanced chip and AI capabilities.”