AI Action Plan Aims to Promote U.S. Leadership, Eliminate Regulations At All Levels

The plan is divided into three pillars: accelerating AI innovation; building American AI infrastructure; and leading in international AI diplomacy and security. “The United States needs to innovate faster and more comprehensively than our competitors in the development and distribution of new AI technology across every field,” the plan states. “We need to build and maintain vast AI infrastructure and the energy to power it… We need to establish American AI—from our advanced semiconductors to our models to our applications—as the gold standard for AI worldwide and ensure our allies are building on American technology.”

The thrust of many of the proposals, and running through all three pillars, is the elimination of any regulation, policy, or prior commitment at the federal, state, and international level that could in any way impede U.S. development and leadership in AI technology.

For instance, the first item listed in the innovation pillar is to “remove red tape and onerous regulation.” Among the specific steps toward that goal is ordering the Office of Science and Technology Policy to solicit public input on “current Federal regulations that hinder AI innovation and adoption;” instructing all federal agencies to “identify, revise, or repeal regulations, rules, memoranda, administrative orders, guidance documents, policy statements, and interagency agreements that unnecessarily hinder AI development or deployment;” ordering the FCC to  “evaluate whether state AI regulations interfere with the agency’s ability to carry out its obligations and authorities under the Communications Act;” and having the FTC review all “investigations commenced under the previous administration to ensure that they do not advance theories of liability that unduly burden AI innovation.”

Read more: White House, Senators Offer Contrasting Plans for AI Development

The plan also calls for the elimination of “references to misinformation, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and climate change” from the Commerce Department’s AI Risk Management Framework, and updating federal procurement guidelines “to ensure that the government only contracts with frontier large language model (LLM) developers who ensure that their systems are objective and free from top-down ideological bias.”

Under the infrastructure pillar, the plan calls for introducing a categorical exclusion from the Environmental Protection Act for data center-related activity, streamlining environmental permitting by reducing regulations under the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, opening federal land to data center construction and power generation infrastructure, and ensuring Clean Water Act permits do not require a “Pre-Construction Notification.”

The infrastructure plan also calls for revitalizing U.S. semiconductor manufacturing “without making bad deals for the American taxpayer or saddling companies with sweeping ideological agendas,” and revamping the CHIPS Program launched by the Biden administration to remove “all extraneous policy requirements for CHIPS-funded semiconductor manufacturing projects.”

On the international front, the plan calls for promoting U.S. leadership by “exporting its full AI technology stack,” from hardware and software to models and standards. It also calls for countering proposals by international organizations, such as the UN, OECD, the G7 and G20, and ICANN, to establish AI governance and development frameworks that “promote cultural agendas that do not align with American values, by advocating for “international AI governance approaches that promote innovation, reflect American values, and counter authoritarian influence.”