Trump Administration Releases AI Action Plan

On July 23, 2025, the White House released Winning the AI Race: America’s AI Action Plan pursuant to Executive Order 14179 (January 23, 2025, “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence”).  The Plan outlines over 90 federal policy actions across three principal pillars: Accelerating AI Innovation, Building American AI Infrastructure, and Leading in International AI Diplomacy and Security.

Under the pillar of Accelerating AI Innovation, the Action Plan generally emphasizes the deregulation of AI technologies so that it is “unencumbered by bureaucratic red tape.”  Specifically, the first pillar:

• directs the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to work with “all” Federal agencies to identify, revise, or repeal regulations that “unnecessarily hinder AI development or deployment”;
• provides significant discretion to distribute AI-related federal funding based on a state’s AI regulatory climate when making funding decisions and limit funding if the state’s AI regulatory regimes hinder AI development;
• directs the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to revise its AI Risk Management Framework to remove references to “misinformation, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and climate change”;
• supports increased short-term access to large-scale computing power by establishing a financial market for compute as a commodity;
• supports the development of open-source and open-weight models to spur AI innovation;
• establishes AI literacy and jobs funding;
• provides federal funding to accelerate AI research and development; and
• seeks to combat deepfakes in the legal system by providing law enforcement agencies and courts with tools to identify fake evidence.

The pillar of Building American AI Infrastructure supports expedited permitting for data centers and semiconductor fabrication plants to rapidly scale national compute capacity.  This second pillar:

• streamlines or reduces regulations under the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, among other laws to expedite environmental permitting of data centers and semiconductor facilities;
• seeks to improve the U.S. power grid to support the requirements of AI;
• makes certain federal lands available for data center construction and power generation infrastructure for data centers;
• removes “extraneous” policy requirements for CHIPS-funded semiconductor manufacturing projects; and
• creates high-security / classified AI data centers and compute environments.

Finally, the third pillar of Leading in International AI Diplomacy and Security, includes a national framework to influence state-level regulation by linking AI regulatory stringency to federal funding eligibility.  Among other policies, the third pillar:

• expands exports of full-stack AI hardware to foreign countries;
• increases collaboration with foreign partners to bolster global chip export control enforcement efforts;
• evaluates frontier AI systems for national security risks in private partnerships with AI developers; and
• invests in nucleic acid sequence screening and customer verification procedures at nucleic acid synthesis providers to screen for fraudulent or malicious uses such as “harmful pathogens.”

The current administration is broadly deregulating AI, scrapping prior Obama/Biden-era regulations and accelerating AI deployment through infrastructure and export support. At the same time, it is increasing targeted oversight by imposing an “ideological neutrality” in federal AI systems that is in line with its own ideology. The Plan frames AI as a transformative force akin to the space race — critical to economic leadership, national security, and technological supremacy. The result is a regulatory stance that prioritizes speed, global competitiveness, and ideological control, while reducing broader regulatory frameworks tied to privacy, safety, or environmental impact.

The winners, under this Plan, are U.S. technology companies, defense contractors, players in the energy ecosystem, and foreign entities willing to rely on the U.S. for AI. At the same time, the Plan weakens the AI regulatory power of states, and limits the influence of those advocating for a more circumspect or multi-lateral approach to AI.