Dive Brief:
- President Donald Trump kept his campaign promise to repeal former President Joe Biden’s AI-focused executive order, issued in October 2023.
- The executive order required advanced AI developers to submit safety results to the federal government. The provisions also called for standards-setting, procurement process changes and the creation of the U.S. AI Safety Institute but stopped short of imposing consequences for non-compliant businesses.
- Analysts and industry experts are expecting President Trump to govern AI with a light regulatory touch. Big tech CEOs, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai, attended the inauguration Monday.
Dive Insight:
The Trump administration spent its first day in the White House enacting a broad regulatory overhaul. The October 2023 executive order is one of more than 70 Biden-era directives rescinded by President Trump.
Trump appointed Silicon Valley investor and entrepreneur David Sacks as White House AI and Crypto Czar, tasked with guiding the administration’s policy. Analysts suggested the pick proved to be another sign of easing restraints on AI innovation.
Lighter federal oversight on the technology could lead to a push for state-level directives, according to Jennifer Everett, partner in Alston & Bird’s technology and privacy group.
“We’ve been telling companies who are using or developing AI that, while you may see the federal government and new administration pumping the brakes on regulatory enforcement, you could see the states filling the void,” Everett told CIO Dive.
Business leaders and CIOs are keeping up with the implications of regulatory movement across states like California, Colorado, Oregon, Montana and Tennessee. The growing patchwork will likely introduce further complexities for enterprises as they aim for compliance.
Global operations are also up against a ticking clock as it relates to enforcement of the European Union’s AI Act.
U.S. business leaders could potentially encounter AI oversight as part of efforts by antitrust and intellectual property protection watchdogs. The Federal Trade Commission is now led by Andrew Ferguson, who was announced in December as President Trump’s pick and previously served as a commissioner for the agency.
Ferguson succeeds Lina Khan, whose tenure was marked by a focus on Big Tech and its business practices. In one of its final moves during the Biden administration, the FTC released a report Friday on its study of the partnerships of Amazon, Google and Microsoft with Anthropic and OpenAI.
Ferguson issued a concurring and dissenting statement Friday, offering a glimpse into the FTC’s potential direction moving forward.
“On the one hand, the Commission must not charge headlong to regulate AI,” Ferguson said. “Such regulation could strangle this nascent technology in its cradle, or move the development of the technology to foreign states hostile to our national interests.”
“On the other hand, the Commission must remain a vigilant competition watchman, ensuring that Big Tech incumbents do not control AI innovators in order to blunt any potential competitive threats,” he added.
The rollback of the executive order paves the way for streamlined innovation in a less federally regulated environment, but that doesn’t mean the federal government’s focus on AI has lessened, according to Gartner Senior Director Analyst Lydia Clougherty Jones.
“This includes continued public and private partnerships for active planning and building AI infrastructure and capabilities to safeguard the U.S.’s competitiveness and technology leadership status,” Clougherty Jones said in an email to CIO Dive.
