Trump Administration Seeks Input from Public on National Artificial Intelligence Action Plan

Significant shifts in U.S. technology policy are taking shape at the start of the new administration. This is especially true in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), where President Trump revoked President Biden’s Executive Order 14110, titled “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence,” as part of his flurry of Day One executive actions. The administration is now moving quickly to put its own stamp on this area in an effort to strengthen U.S. AI leadership and competitiveness and outpace other nations, particularly the People’s Republic of China.

These efforts include the recent release of a public Request for Information (RFI) in the Federal Register on the development of a national AI Action Plan, offering stakeholders the opportunity to shape the conversation and outcome.

AI Action Plan RFI

On February 6, 2025, the National Science Foundation (NSF), on behalf of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), released an RFI to solicit the public’s input for creating a national AI Action Plan. This directive, initiated by Trump in the January 23, 2025, Executive Order (EO) 14179 “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence,” aims to “define the priority policy actions needed to sustain and enhance America's AI dominance, and to ensure that unnecessarily burdensome requirements do not hamper private sector AI innovation.”

The RFI invites input from academia, industry groups, private sector organizations, government entities, and other interested parties to recommend “concrete AI policy actions” on a broad range of related topics, identified in the RFI to include:

• Hardware and chips
• Data centers
• Energy consumption and efficiency
• Model development
• Open-source development
• Application and use
• Explainability and assurance of AI model outputs
• Cybersecurity
• Data privacy and security throughout the lifecycle of AI development and deployment
• Risks, regulation, and governance
• Technical and safety standards
• National security and defense
• Research and development
• Education and the workforce
• Innovation and competition
• Intellectual property
• Procurement
• International collaboration
• Export controls

Comments are due on or before 11:59 PM ET on March 15, 2025.

The RFI is a significant opportunity for diverse sets of stakeholders across industries to engage in and influence U.S. policy. Given the breadth of topics included in the RFI, comments on one or multiple of these domains are likely to be welcomed.

What follows is a sampling of considerations and insights to guide organizations and individuals as they contemplate, draft, and continue to track these developments:

The AI Action Plan is Consistent with President Trump’s Antiregulatory Approach to AI

President Trump’s proposed AI Action Plan is one of many steps the Trump administration has taken in its early weeks to diverge from President Biden’s more cautious approach to AI policy. In the view of the new administration, the previous policy imposed unnecessarily burdensome requirements that stifled private sector innovation and threatened American AI leadership. In EO 14179, President Trump directed federal agencies to review and potentially revise or rescind measures from the previous Biden order that do not align with this administration’s goals. This includes revising OMB Memoranda M-24-10, “Advancing Governance, Innovation, and Risk Management for Agency Use of Artificial Intelligence,” and M-24-18, “Advancing the Responsible Acquisition of Artificial Intelligence in Government,” concerning the government’s acquisition and use of AI. Additionally, President Trump joined private sector CEOs at the White House for the launch of “Project Stargate,” a major initiative to enhance U.S. AI capabilities in collaboration with private entities OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank, and MGK, focusing on building $500 billion worth of compute and AI infrastructure over the next four years.

These efforts indicate the strong deregulatory flavor that we should expect from the Trump administration on matters related to AI development and deployment.

Expect to See Input on How the U.S. Should Respond to DeepSeek

Concerns over U.S. AI leadership have heightened with the rapid rise of the Chinese AI company DeepSeek, whose recently released generative AI app “R1” has surpassed other U.S. options in popularity, including domestically. The narratives prompted by DeepSeek’s arrival are many. Chief among them is whether U.S. tech can sustain its AI dominance after DeepSeek claimed to develop and deploy its app at a fraction of the cost of its U.S. competitors and without the benefit of their most advanced chips. The latter has also raised questions about the wisdom and efficacy of a U.S. export control regime that has been persistently focused on curtailing access to high-end chips, presuming that such access was necessary to achieve the kind of advancements that DeepSeek now claims. Beyond geopolitics, stakeholders across the globe have flagged sprawling operational concerns regarding DeepSeek’s model, including its data storage practices, model resilience, database cybersecurity, and safety mechanisms.

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are grappling with the appropriate legislative response, with some calling for the app to be banned on all federal government devices and others focusing on a bill that would cut China off from U.S. AI development altogether. President Trump responded by describing the app’s rise in popularity as a “wake-up call” for the U.S. tech industry to intensify efforts to compete with China.

Given the current trajectory of these efforts, it is anticipated that the Trump administration will continue to focus on deregulatory policies designed to maintain the U.S.’s competitive edge over China. We anticipate that responses to the RFI will offer a diversity of perspectives on how to respond to DeepSeek, and the ultimate Action Plan will likely focus closely on the topic of competing AI products from other countries including China.

Consider Contrasts with the EU’s Approach to Regulation of AI and Related Digital Legislation

The European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act takes a risk-based approach to regulating AI systems, taking particular aim at AI applications that create “unacceptable risk” such as social scoring systems and manipulative AI. The key to the U.S. approach to AI development might rest on what “risks” are deemed regulation-worthy in this administration. Even the European Commission – traditionally a strong defender of human rights and dignity – signaled a shift away from accountability by withdrawing the divisive AI Liability Directive (which proposed liability rules for damages caused by AI systems), presumably to encourage innovation and promote EU competitiveness in the AI-development race.

This abrupt pivot on AI liability in particular responds to the tenor of the recent much-publicized Paris AI Action Summit, where leaders like France’s President Emmanuel Macron and U.S. Vice President JD Vance emphasized the need for simplified rules, reduced burdens on the AI industry, and a stronger focus on AI opportunities and research and development investments.

Notwithstanding this change, the EU retains what some have called its “blue wall” of the most comprehensive and impactful digital regulation on the planet, touching on topics squarely within the remit of the RFI, including, e.g., the General Data Protection Regulation (privacy); the NIS 2 Directive (cybersecurity); and the Data Governance Act (conditions for certain data use and intermediation services).  

We expect stakeholders, including multinationals subject to both U.S. and EU jurisdictions, to opine on the relative merits of EU-specific legislation, establishing a clear benchmark against which U.S. policy should be measured. The relative value of interoperability and regulatory compatibility may be useful topics to engage, considering current geopolitical alignments.

How Federal AI Policy Will Align with State AI Policy Remains Unclear

While the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government have actively investigated the impact of AI on U.S. commerce and growth, the states have taken a much more active role proposing and enacting AI legislation. State-level AI legislation is as broad and diverse as the U.S. economy, covering topics such as the use of AI for employment decisions, insurance coverage decisions, and loan decisions, developing AI in ways that limit fraud, confusion, or coercion, and protecting the intellectual property interests of creators.

These topics heavily overlap with the broad range of topics listed in the RFI, and we anticipate comments that both support and diverge from the perspectives offered at the state level. For businesses, the RFI provides an opportunity to raise support or concern about state-level policy trends, as well as to attempt to focus the federal government’s attention in certain directions.