On July 23, 2025, the US White House released its long-awaited “Winning the AI Race: America’s AI Action Plan” in accordance with President Trump’s January executive order on Removing Barriers to American Leadership in AI.
White House officials saythat over 10,000 public comments have been received from various stakeholders, especially US industry, and were taken into account in the plan formulation.
The policy recommendations laid out in the action plan are well-organized and draw connections between scientific, domestic, and international priorities.
The key difference between the Trump USA AI Action Plan and the Biden Administration AI Blueprint is in governance and regulatory guardrails. This new plan focuses on AI acceleration in a race, primarily against China’s AI leadership.
Given the pace of change, the United States’ success will be based on continuing to grow the AI ecosystem as a collective whole and for the ecosystem to iterate faster to compete more effectively.
The Winning the AI race action plan positioned strongly that AI will usher in a new golden age of human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security for the American people.
The Plan identified over 90 Federal policy actions across three pillars – Accelerating Innovation, Building American AI Infrastructure, and Leading in International Diplomacy and Security – that the Trump Administration will take in the coming weeks and months.
Key policies in the AI Action Plan include:
- Exporting American AI: The Commerce and State Departments will partner with industry to deliver secure, full-stack AI export packages – including hardware, models, software, applications, and standards – to America’s friends and allies around the world.
- Promoting Rapid Buildout of Data Centers: Expediting and modernizing permits for data centers and semiconductor fabs, as well as creating new national initiatives to increase high-demand occupations like electricians and HVAC technicians.
- Enabling Innovation and Adoption: Removing onerous Federal regulations that hinder AI development and deployment, and seeking private sector input on rules to remove.
- Upholding Free Speech in Frontier Models: Updating Federal procurement guidelines to ensure that the government only contracts with frontier large language model developers who ensure that their systems are objective and free from top-down ideological bias.
President Trump has prioritized AI as a cornerstone of American innovation, powering a new age of American leadership in science, technology, and global influence.
This action plan reaffirms Federal efforts to turbocharge our innovation capacity, build cutting-edge infrastructure, and lead globally, ensuring that American workers and families thrive in the AI era.
However, three questions have yet to be answered:
First, the Federal government has cut its budget and staff so deeply that how can they possibly focus on technology and global norms, especially when the National Science Foundation R&D has been deeply wounded? Platitudes won’t make it – budget and expertise are critical to win the race.
Second, how will governance prevail when there is no overarching framework and laws to reward states for alignment? As we can already see USA States are putting in their own laws, regulatory controls, and frameworks. Humans are messy and without alignment guardrails, costs usually run amok, and more concerning is the burden on companies having to understand the different laws or regulations across states.
Third, the Act clearly indicates it will work with other global AI organizations, but the gap in the Act is on how.
Conclusion:
The action plan is not a surprise in its positioning, given the Paris AI Summit, where the USA did not sign the accord,which emphasized human safety in the usage of AI.
Corporations, boards of directors, and citizens across industries need to ensure there is a better balance on the usage of AI, and the types of AI applications developed are ethical and are in the best interests of humanity.
I am an advocate for A, we build AI applications and help companies develop strategies and solutions based on responsible AI principles. I remain concerned that the US ACT is not highlighting the risks of AI Bias, AI Hallucination or AI ingenuous behaviors (ie: deliberating holding the truth from humans) – all well-understood AI risks advocated strongly by the GodFather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton.
The short-term risks of bad actors using AI for bad purposes. The long-term risk is that AI is much smarter than us, and it’s an existential threat, so our challenge as humans is AI wiping us out, according to Geoffrey Hinton.
Having guardrails ensuring AI does not deliberately harm humans is worth more safety considerations. Your Voice Really Matters!
