Washington announces new AI strategy, prioritizing easing related regulations to help the US maintain its leadership in this field.
The 25-page “US AI Action Plan” strategy released by the Trump administration lists three goals: promoting innovation, building infrastructure, and helping Washington continue to lead the world in AI.
The White House considers this field a key factor for the US to maintain its economic and military superiority. Environmental impacts are not focused on in the strategy.
“The United States is the country that launched the AI race. As President of the United States, I am here today to declare that Washington will win,” US President Donald Trump declared at an AI event held in Washington.
“Winning this race is a test of our capabilities, something we have never seen since the beginning of the space age,” Trump said, before signing several executive orders to provide more legal ground for the strategy.
President Trump’s plan includes 90 government proposals that call for loosening regulatory constraints, pledging to “eliminate red tape and burdensome regulations” that could hinder the development of AI in the private sector.
The Trump administration has also called on federal agencies to seek legal remedies to prevent states from enacting their own AI regulations, and has threatened to cut off federal aid to any administration that does so.
“We need a unified federal standard, not 50 different sets of regulations in each state for this industry of the future,” the US leader stressed.
The American Civil Liberties Union warned that this would hinder “initiatives to protect citizens and communities from bias in AI in areas like employment, education, health care, and law enforcement.”
According to the Trump administration’s strategy, AI systems must be “ideologically free” and designed to pursue objective truth, rather than “socially biased” efforts like diversity and inclusion policies. This criterion will apply to AI companies that want to do business with the US government.
President Trump also proposed broad copyright exemptions for AI systems, which are at the center of many lawsuits, calling it a “reasonable” approach.
“No AI program can succeed if it has to pay for every article, book, and paper it reads or studies,” the White House chief said.
A focus of the strategy is building AI infrastructure, including simplifying permitting procedures for data centers and power facilities, prioritizing construction progress over environmental concerns.
Specifically, the Trump administration proposed creating new exceptions to the environmental review process for data centers, expanding access to federally owned land for AI infrastructure development. President Trump also called for the rapid construction of nuclear and coal-fired power plants to power data centers.
The new strategy also includes efforts to “counter Chinese influence in international governance bodies,” as well as tightening export controls on advanced AI computing technology. The plan also calls for the U.S. government to help American technology conquer foreign markets, a priority outlined in the executive order.
According to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, these plans will help the United States establish a “gold standard” in technology globally, ensuring that the world “will continue to run on American technology.”
Meanwhile, critics say the policy is a gift to big U.S. tech companies, which are no longer aggressively pursuing the goal of reducing carbon emissions to zero to meet the growing computing needs of AI.