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Reactions to the Trump Administration's AI Action Plan

Prithvi Iyer / Jul 24, 2025

Graphic from the Trump Administration's launch of AI.gov on July 23, 2025. (Source)

On Wednesday, July 23, 2025, the White House released “Winning the AI Race: America’s AI Action Plan.” The plan outlines a sweeping strategy to accelerate artificial intelligence deployment across the US economy and government. The 28-page document marks a sharp departure from the Biden Administration’s more AI-safety-focused approach. Key elements of the plan include:

  • Push for federal deregulation: Agencies across the federal government are tasked with removing existing rules and regulations that would inhibit the development and use of AI, including fast-tracking AI infrastructure projects and exempting those projects from federal environmental law.
  • Discourage state AI regulations: Funding programs for AI projects should take into account a state’s AI regulatory climate when making funding decisions, and agencies, including the Federal Communication Commission, should scrutinize AI laws in states to determine if they conflict with federal authority.
  • Ideology-free AI: Federal procurement rules should only allow contracts with AI systems that are “objective and free from top-down ideological bias,” including amending the NIST AI Risk Management Framework “to eliminate references to misinformation, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and climate change.”
  • Accelerate adoption within the federal government: Speeding up procurement and use within the government, particularly at the Department of Defense, through talent-exchange programs and mandates for agencies to provide access to AI tools and adequate training for federal employees.
  • Countering China through “International AI Diplomacy”: Develop “full stack” AI export packages for allies and trading partners “willing to join America’s AI alliance,” tighten enforcement of AI-focused export controls, and leverage the US position in standards-setting bodies to advance AI that “reflects American values.”

Accompanying the plan were three executive orders designed to crack down on what the Trump Administration views as “ideological biases” in AI systems, promote the global export of US-developed AI infrastructure, and streamline the buildout of data centers.

The following is a compilation of public statements and reactions to the plan from policymakers, industry representatives, policy experts, and civil society organizations.

Cody Venzke, Senior Policy Counsel, American Civil Liberties Union

“President Trump’s attempt to restrict state AI regulations is not only harmful, it raises serious legal questions as the president is acting beyond any statute passed by Congress. Congress overwhelmingly rejected this approach, removing it from a major bill in a 99-1 Senate vote, and 17 Republican governors publicly opposed it. Now the administration is moving forward unilaterally. The plan undermines state authority by directing the Federal Communications Commission to review and potentially override state AI laws, while cutting off ‘AI-related’ federal funding to states that adopt robust protections. This preemption effort stifles local initiatives to uphold civil rights and shield communities from biased AI systems in areas like employment, education, health care, and policing.”

Read the full statement here.

Brad Carson, President, Americans for Responsible Innovation

“Ultimately, this action plan is about increasing oversight of AI systems while maintaining a hands-off approach to hard and fast regulations. On biosecurity, AI interpretability, evaluations, and incident response, this plan creates an opportunity for us to better understand what’s happening inside the black box of AI and the big risks frontier models create for the public. At the same time, the plan’s targeting of state-passed AI safeguards is cause for concern. For America to lead on AI, we have to build public trust in these systems, and safeguards are essential to that public confidence.”

Samir Jain, Vice President of Policy, Center for Democracy and Technology

“Today’s AI Action Plan is a missed opportunity. Although promoting innovation is important, the Plan whiffs by failing to include measures to help ensure that AI development and deployment happens responsibly and addresses potential harms. Instead, the Plan includes actively detrimental provisions. For example, the Administration should not hinder state officials in their efforts to respond to the real and documented harms created by AI. The government should not be acting as a Ministry of AI Truth or insisting that AI models hew to its preferred interpretation of reality. There is no reason to weaken the AI Risk Management Framework by eliminating references to some of the real risks that AI poses. To be sure, the Plan has some positive elements, including promotion of open-source and open-weight systems, support for building an AI evaluations ecosystem, and an increased focus on the security of AI systems. But ultimately, the Plan is highly unbalanced, focusing too much on promoting the technology while largely failing to address the ways in which it could potentially harm people.”

KD Chavez, Executive Director, Climate Justice Alliance

“This US AI Action Plan doesn’t just open the door for Big Tech and Big Oil to team up, it unhinges and removes any and all doors—it opens the floodgates, continuing to kneecap our communities’ rights to protect ourselves. With tech and oil’s track records on human rights and their role in the climate crisis, and what they are already doing now to force AI dominance, we need more corporate and environmental oversight, not less.”

Read the full statement here.

Portia Allen-Kyle, Interim Executive Director, Color of Change

“For years, Color Of Change has led the fight to protect Black communities from tech exploitation. Trump’s AI Action Plan makes our work more urgent than ever. This plan accelerates every harm we’ve been fighting: algorithms that deny Black families homes and jobs, surveillance systems that criminalize our neighborhoods, and data centers that poison our children. This is racial justice work at its core. When facial recognition wrongfully arrests Black people at rates 5 times higher than whites, that’s a civil rights crisis. When AI lending algorithms reject 80% of qualified Black applicants, that’s digital redlining. When tech companies build polluting infrastructure in Black neighborhoods without consent, that’s environmental racism.

“Congress must pass comprehensive AI civil rights legislation that includes mandatory bias audits, community consent for tech infrastructure, and real penalties for discriminatory AI. The Trump administration wants to turn America into a playground for unregulated AI experimentation. But we’ve stopped tech giants before, and we’ll do it again. The future of AI will be decided by the people, not billionaires.”

Read the statement here.

Josh Landau, Senior Counsel for Innovation Policy, CCIA

“When it comes to AI technology that will become an ordinary part of the process for innovation and creation, it is crucial that U.S. companies are able to compete – not just to fulfill economic goals, but to safeguard interests like privacy, national security, and promote democratic values. Importantly, the AI Action Plan includes elements that instruct the government to remove barriers to AI infrastructure in the U.S. and the export of American AI, notes that open-source models have an important role to play, and tasks agencies with creating frameworks for improved AI security.”

Read the full statement here.

Grace Gedye, Policy Analyst, Consumer Reports

“AI holds tremendous promise, but also serious risks for consumers. In the absence of Congressional action, states must be permitted to move forward with rules that protect consumers. Today’s action leaves states in a lurch; it’s unclear which state laws will be considered “burdensome” and which federal funds are on the line. Earlier this month, Big Tech lobbyists tried to insert a 10-year moratorium on state AI laws into the budget bill but a bipartisan group of senators voted overwhelmingly to reject it. At a time of deep political division, there is rare and welcome consensus that states should be allowed to continue advancing AI rules that protect consumers.”

Read the full statement here.

Emily Peterson-Cassin, Corporate Power Director, Demand Progress

“The AI moratorium has risen from the grave, resurrected in Trump’s ‘AI Action Plan’ by Big Tech vulture capitalists. Though we are still reviewing it, it is clear that this zombie AI moratorium continues Big Tech’s relentless drive to tear down commonsense safeguards protecting Americans from half-baked ‘driverless’ cars and deepfaked revenge porn. Republicans and Democrats in Congress overwhelmingly rejected the wildly unpopular AI moratorium, so now Big Tech is doing an end-run around the democratic process by jamming it through via executive order. President Trump must reject this zombie AI moratorium and side with the American people, not the Big Tech billionaires eager to sacrifice Americans’ safety, jobs, water and power to AI.”

Read the full statement here.

Kit Walsh, Director of AI and Access-to-Knowledge Legal Projects, Electronic Frontier Foundation

“The part of the executive order titled 'Ensure that Frontier AI Protects Free Speech and American Values' seems to be motivated by a desire to control what information is available through AI tools and may propose actions that would violate the First Amendment. Generative AI implicates the First Amendment rights of users to receive information, and typically also reflects protected expressive choices of the many human beings involved in shaping the messages the AI writes. The government can no more dictate what ideas are conveyed through AI than through newspapers or websites. The government has more leeway to decide which services it purchases for its own use, but may not use this power to punish a publisher for making available AI services that convey ideas the government dislikes. The plan seeks to require that 'the government only contracts with' developers who meet the administration's ideological criteria. While the government can choose to purchase only services that meet such criteria, it cannot require that developers refrain from also providing non-government users other services conveying other ideas. The trustworthiness of AI outputs is a critical issue, and is only more important when AI is used as a decision-making tool by the government. The action plan, however, prioritizes this administration's own ideological viewpoints over accuracy.”

Alan Butler, Executive Director, EPIC

“The AI Action Plan is yet another gift to Big Tech that clearly shows the Trump administration is again placing corporate interests ahead of the needs of everyday Americans.”

Read the full statement here.

Hodan Omaar, Senior Policy Manager, Center of Data Innovation (ITIF)

“The AI Action Plan shows the Trump administration is serious about winning the global AI race. It marks a clear evolution from the President’s 2019 AI initiative and reflects just how dramatically the global AI landscape has shifted over the past six years. The plan rightly recognizes that beating China demands a comprehensive effort—unleashing infrastructure to fuel model development, removing regulatory frictions that slow development and deployment, and promoting the export of American AI technology. These steps put the United States on a path not only to benefit from AI today, but to remain the global leader in the future.

“But for Americans to support these efforts, they will need to see tangible improvements in the everyday areas of their lives where AI can make a difference—such as lower energy bills, better healthcare, faster disaster response, and more efficient public services. The plan’s commitments to launch domain-specific efforts and establish regulatory sandboxes in areas like healthcare, energy, and agriculture are important steps toward delivering those gains. Whether these efforts scale and deliver results will determine whether the plan fulfills its dual promise: AI for the American people—and American AI for global leadership.”

Read the statement here.

Patrick Hedger, Director of Policy, NetChoice

“NetChoice applauds the White House’s AI Action Plan overall and is encouraged to see the focus on red tape reduction and investment in America’s future. From unleashing energy to embracing regulatory humility and ensuring our AI systems are adopted around the world, we look forward to working with the President to usher in the Golden Age of American innovation. The difference between the Trump administration and Biden’s is effectively night and day. The Biden administration did everything it could to command and control the fledgling but critical sector. That is a failed model, evident in the lack of a serious tech sector of any kind in the European Union and its tendency to rush to regulate anything that moves. The Trump AI Action Plan, by contrast, is focused on asking where the government can help the private sector, but otherwise, get out of the way.”

Read the full statement here.

Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-MA)

“In their broad claims about censorship by the tech platforms, Republicans continue to mistake fact-based outcomes for bias against conservatives. Although the right continues to lean heavily on anecdotal examples of Big Tech’s alignment with liberal viewpoints, it ignores even more egregious evidence to the contrary. For example, on May 1, 2025, Grok — the AI chatbot developed by xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company—acknowledged that ‘xAI tried to train me to appeal to the right.’ If OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini had responded that it was trained to appeal to the left, congressional Republicans would have been outraged and opened an investigation. Instead, they were silent.”

Read the full statement here.

Nicholas Garcia, Senior Policy Counsel, Public Knowledge

“This plan is action without vision or direction. Cutting regulations and eliminating protections is, by itself, not a plan for innovation and competition in AI – it is a handout to already-entrenched, powerful tech companies. The real constraints on AI innovation are well-known: access to training data, compute power, and research talent. This plan’s solutions in those areas are severely lacking. At its heart, the plan is starkly divided between political posturing and serious science.”

Read the full statement here.

Adam Thierer, Senior Fellow, R Street Institute

“While the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan has charted a wise policy course to bolster innovation and beat China, Congress needs to step up and help advance the nation’s AI agenda. Many of the EOs and policy actions this administration is pursuing can be easily undone by a future administration.”

Read the full statement here.

Linda Moore, CEO, TechNet

“TechNet strongly supports the administration’s AI Action Plan and is especially grateful for their willingness to work with industry to establish best practices. This policy framework takes critical steps towards developing a strong domestic workforce, building critical AI infrastructure, launching public-private partnerships, removing regulatory barriers to innovation, strengthening the domestic AI stack, and enhancing U.S. global AI diplomacy. The AI Action Plan makes clear that countering Chinese influence and securing America’s leadership in the AI race are top priorities for the United States. We look forward to continuing to work closely with the administration on policies that advance AI innovation while safeguarding the public interest and ensuring America’s global AI dominance.”

Read the full statement here.

Authors

Prithvi Iyer
Prithvi Iyer is Program Manager at Tech Policy Press. He completed a Master's of Global Affairs from the University of Notre Dame, where he also served as Assistant Director of the Peacetech and Polarization Lab. Prior to his graduate studies, he worked as a research assistant for the Observer Resea...

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