In an effort to keep the United States at the forefront of the artificial intelligence race, the Trump administration announced an AI Action Plan on Wednesday. The program is a component of a larger push that the White House started earlier this year when it issued an executive order lifting the Biden administration’s restrictions on AI.
In general, the strategy, which consists of over 90 federal policy initiatives, will:
- Encourage the build-out of data centers, semiconductor manufacturing facilities, and the electric grid.
- Establish restrictions on which companies the government contracts with in an effort to eliminate “ideological bias” in chatbots.
- States with “burdensome AI regulations” should not get funds.
- Require government agencies to examine and remove any regulations that “hinder AI development”
- Create a program to provide U.S. allies with AI export packages that include hardware, models, software, applications, and standards.
Mr. Trump is scheduled to give the keynote presentation at an AI event in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, when he will discuss the new plan and sign executive orders connected to it. The nonpartisan Hill and Valley Forum and the All-In Podcast, a business and technology program hosted by four tech investors and entrepreneurs, including David Sacks, Trump’s AI and Crypto Czar, will co-host the launch.
On a news conference with reporters on Wednesday morning, Sacks stated, “The goal here is for the United States to win the AI race.”
“The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) supports the plan, which will be implemented over the next six months to a year,” said Michael Kratsios, OSTP policy director.
In an email to CBS MoneyWatch, Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, stated, “This is a watershed day for Trump to lay out the AI vision and make sure the U.S. stays ahead of China despite all the trade deal turmoil.”
What does the AI Action Plan include?
During Wednesday’s call, Sacks outlined the major principles of the AI Action Plan, which focuses on expanding AI infrastructure and speeding up AI innovation to guarantee that the United States leads in global “AI diplomacy.”
This includes accelerating the building of massive data centers, which contain networking equipment, servers, and other technology that powers artificial intelligence.
Currently, the United States is home to thousands of data centers. Most of them are linked to the country’s electrical grid and depend on enormous quantities of electricity to function. One factor contributing to the rise in energy expenses has been identified is the expansion of AI data centers.
It is anticipated that the number of data centers would increase as technology businesses increase their expenditures for new projects. Major efforts are under progress at Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, and xAI.
According to Kratsios, the plan includes investments in data center construction as well as “expediting and modernizing programs” for semiconductor fabrication plants, or fabs, and rebuilding the country’s electrical infrastructure to meet the massive energy requirements of AI supercomputing.
Keeping chatbots from exhibiting what White House officials have referred to as “ideological bias” will be another priority. Sacks, a former executive at PayPal, has been very critical of this since a 2024 incident involving Google’s AI image generator, which produced images of Native American, Asian, and Black men when asked to display an American Founding Father.
“We think AI systems should not be built to follow socially engineered agendas and should be free from ideological bias,” Sacks stated on Wednesday. In order to ensure that AI continues to be truth-seeking and reliable, we have some recommendations there.
In order to do this, Kratsios stated that the strategy would revise federal procurement regulations to guarantee that the government only gives contracts to LLM developers whose systems “permit free speech expression to flourish.”
As it contends with nations like China, which has been extending its AI footprint, the strategy will also emphasize preserving the United States’ competitive advantage in the worldwide struggle for AI supremacy. According to a top White House official, “the assessment backs export restrictions to prevent [other] nations from obtaining our most cutting-edge technology.”
As part of its efforts, the White House hopes to eliminate what it calls red tape and “onerous regulation” that have stifled AI progress. The person also stated that the proposal asks for the elimination of diversity, equity, inclusion, and climate (DEI) spending criteria from the Biden administration’s CHIPS Act.
The Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) for America Act’s DEI rules “burden the industry” and “slow down the delivery of critical projects,” they said.
