President Donald Trump's administration has announced a new AI action plan that includes a strategy to boost the US standing in AI to compete with China for control of the rapidly growing sector.
The White House released its 25-page “American AI Action Plan” on Wednesday.
This includes 90 different policy proposals that the administration says will increase AI tools from its allies around the world. It will also promote production of new data centers across the United States. It is not clear which regulations are at issue, but it will remove federal regulations that “thwart AI development.”
In a statement, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the plan “ensures that America will set gold standards for technology all over the world, and that the world will continue to operate with American technology.”
The president is set to issue a series of executive orders outlining key parts of the New York plan at around 5pm (21:00 GMT).
“We believe we are in an AI race and we want the US to win that race,” White House's Isal David Sachs told reporters Wednesday.
The White House said the plan would “combat China's influence on international governance groups,” and also said it would give the US more control over AI technology exports.
However, the administration did not provide details on how it would be done.
The plan outlined by the Trump administration also includes a framework for analyzing models constructed by China, assessing its consistency with “Chinese Communist Party topics and censorship.”
Free speech in the spotlight
The plan also says it will maintain the model's freedom of speech that will allow the system to be “objective and free from top-down ideological bias” for organizations that want to do business with the federal government.
A senior White House official said the main target is an AI model that takes into account diversity and inclusion, as experts say, as the government's perceived liberal bias in contrast to overall bias.
“The government should not act as a ministry of AI truth or argue that the AI model will lead to a positive interpretation of reality,” Samir Jain, vice president of policy at the Centre for Democracy Technology, said in a statement provided to Al Jazeera.
“The plan is very disproportionate and while it is focused too much on promoting technology, it cannot address ways that could potentially harm people.”
Conservatives have long accused AI chatbots of having liberal bias comparable to comments on legacy media to provide important reporting on the administration. But that comes when users of grokai, former Trump ally and right-wing big-name Elon Musk's AI platform, accused it of having a right-wing lean. Musk's X AI is part of a $200 million package with the Pentagon, which has other AI companies including Openai.
Building a data center
The key focus of the new plan is to build new data centers for AI technology as the industry expands rapidly. The administration said it would include streamlining permits for the development of new centres and energy production facilities used to power these data centers.
The plan avoids environmental concerns, a major criticism of the AI industry. AI says, “America is challenging us to build much greater energy generation than we do today,” the plan says.
AI data centers are linked to increased electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. According to Google's 2024 Sustainability Report, since 2019, electricity greenhouse gas emissions have increased by 48%.
“This result was primarily due to increased energy consumption in data centers and supply chain emissions. As AI is further integrated into products, reducing emissions can be difficult due to increased energy demand from the strength of AI calculations and the expected increase in emissions from technological infrastructure investments,” the report states.
The rationalization of permits is because the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) plans to reverse the scientific decision that greenhouse gas emissions put public health at risk. The change will remove the legal framework based on climate regulations, Reuters reports, citing two unnamed sources.
This reversal removes “hazard detection” and makes it easier for EPA to revoke legislation limiting greenhouse gas emissions at energy production facilities, including those used to power AI data centers.
The administration has created exceptions to environmental reviews for the construction of data centers, allowing access to federal lands to be expanded for AI development.
“AI will improve American lives, not by complementing American lives,” the plan says.
However, for AI, it comes when employers across the country scrap jobs. Earlier this month, Recruit Holdings, the parent company of Endy and Glassdoor, cut 1,300 jobs directly attributable to AI.
In June, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said AI is doing 30-50% of the company's workload. In February, the tech giant fired 1,000 employees.
Analysts say the plan looks promising for investors in the AI sector.
“This is a fork in the AI revolution and Trump is aware of this AI military competition between the US and China.
At 4pm (20:00 GMT) in New York, stocks in AI-focused companies had mixed results. Nvidia increased by 2.1%. Palantir has increased by 3.6%, Oracle has increased by 1.5%, and Microsoft has increased by 0.3%. Meanwhile, Google's parent company Alphabet fell 0.5%.
