Trump AI Action Plan Charts Pro-Innovation Path Forward to Beat China
This analysis is in response to breaking news and it will be updated. Please contact pr@rstreet.org to speak with the author.
Today, the White House released an important 23-page AI policy blueprint entitled, “Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan.” This was the product of the administration’s February “Request for Information (RFI) on the Development of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Action Plan,” which sought public comments on “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 White House received over 10,000 comments in response to the RFI.
The AI Action Plan rests on three pillars: accelerating AI innovation, building out American AI infrastructure, and leading in international AI diplomacy and security. It includes detailed recommendations for advancing each objective and instructs various agencies to play a role in ensuring their policies support, rather than hinder, AI development. “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, and dismantle unnecessary regulatory barriers that hinder the private sector in doing so,” the plan says.
Some of the more notable recommendations include efforts to encourage AI adoption broadly and open source AI in particular; improve training to help create a more skilled AI-ready workforce; bolster cybersecurity processes; streamline permitting processes to help with growing AI-related energy needs; accelerate AI use by the government; and prioritize government investment across the AI technology stack.
Why a “Try-First” Innovation Culture is Essential
The R Street Institute submitted two detailed filings in the AI Action Plan RFI. One comment outlined various broad-based policy steps needed to ensure that a light-touch “AI opportunity agenda” could unleash competition and investment while enhancing national strength. The comment also highlighted specific reforms needed to meet growing AI energy needs, ensure balanced copyright policies for AI, protect algorithmic free speech, and ensure America attracts the talent needed to compete globally. That comment also stressed how essential it is for the administration and Congress to work together to craft a national policy framework to protect the free flow of interstate algorithmic commerce and address important national security priorities. A second R Street submission focused on bolstering America’s dominance in AI on the global stage while strengthening both AI security and the nation’s cybersecurity more generally through AI-driven capabilities.
The administration’s AI Action Plan aligns closely with these priorities by stressing how “[a] coordinated Federal effort would be beneficial in establishing a dynamic, ‘try-first’ culture for AI across American industry.” This reflects the general ethos of “permissionless innovation” that R Street supports and which made the American digital technology sector dominant globally while greatly expanding consumer choices and free speech more generally. R Street research on AI policy repeatedly stresses the importance of “getting AI innovation culture right” by sending positive signals to entrepreneurs, investors, and consumers that indicate innovation is welcome in this arena. While there are some unnecessary regulatory elements in the AI Action Plan, such as provisions suggesting the need for agencies to ensure large language models are “free from top-down ideological bias,” the document generally embodies such a light-touch, pro-innovation policy culture for America.
The Trump AI Vision Comes Into Focus
The AI Action Plan also extends the policy blueprint the Trump administration has sketched out since returning to the White House six months ago. During his first week back in office, President Trump immediately repealed the Biden administration’s historically long AI executive order (EO) and began moving away from the fear-based, over-regulatory vision that the Biden administration set forth in their “AI Bill of Rights” blueprint. President Trump’s new January 23rd EO, “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence,” instead aimed to “solidify our position as the global leader in AI … to sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance in order to promote human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security.”
Shortly thereafter, Vice President JD Vance made AI opportunity the centerpiece of remarks at the Paris AI Action Summit in February. “We believe that excessive regulation of the AI sector could kill a transformative industry just as it’s taking off, and we’ll make every effort to encourage pro-growth AI policies,” Vance stated.
This vision was bolstered by a March 26 letter that President Trump sent to Michael Kratsios, the Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, which instructed him to explore ways “to cement America’s global technological leadership and usher in the Golden Age of American Innovation.” In his first major address, Kratsios sketched out “a strategy of both promotion and protection” for AI and other critical technologies, and he explained how “the greatest obstacle to limitless energy in this country has been a regulatory regime opposed to innovation and development.” “We’ve got to let the private sector cook,” Trump’s AI czar David Sacks later said, referring to the administration’s desire to give American firms the freedom to “out-innovate the competition.”
These statements led to the AI Action Plan, which offers additional detail about where the Trump administration hopes to take AI policy going forward. The administration has also issued an EO on promoting AI skills and education, opened an RFI asking for public comments on how to update the “National AI Research and Development Strategic Plan,” and announced major energy-related initiatives to support AI and data center growth.
Taken together, the new AI Action Plan and the policy actions that preceded it make it clear that beating China in AI is the administration’s top priority and that the freedom to innovate and invest is the key to winning. The AI Action Plan specifically identifies the need to counter Chinese influence in global markets and governance forums. Specifically, it recommends that federal agencies “leverage the U.S. position in international diplomatic and standard-setting bodies to vigorously advocate for international AI governance approaches that promote innovation, reflect American values, and counter authoritarian influence.” R Street testimony from April explained why this sort of response was essential to ensure that China’s variety of “tech authoritarianism” does not become dominant globally.
Time for Congress to Step Up
While the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan has charted a wise policy course to bolster innovation and beat China, Congress needs to step up and help advance the nation’s AI agenda. Many of the EOs and policy actions this administration is pursuing can be easily undone by a future administration.
With over 1,000 AI-related measures pending in the U.S. today, preemption will need to be part of this discussion. During consideration of the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB), the House passed an AI regulatory moratorium that would have limited state and local regulation of AI systems. The moratorium was rejected by the Senate before the OBBB advanced, however.
The AI Action Plan instructs OMB to “work with Federal agencies that have AI-related discretionary funding programs to ensure, consistent with applicable law, that they consider a state’s AI regulatory climate when making funding decisions and limit funding if the state’s AI regulatory regimes may hinder the effectiveness of that funding or award.” This is consistent with the approach Congress considered with the AI moratorium, which would have used federal spending leverage to discourage a patchwork of costly and confusing state AI regulations that would undermine the interstate marketplace and national priorities, including beating China in the AI race.
While the administration has some leverage to forestall regulatory efforts in the states, Congress still needs to consider AI legislation that would either impose a moratorium on state and local regulation or even more formal preemption of such conflicting mandates. An earlier R Street analysis identified potential elements of a baseline AI bill, including preemption and certain safety-related steps for frontier AI systems.
Conclusion
America is in stiff competition with China for global AI supremacy and could still lose this race as Chinese capabilities continue to advance rapidly across the full AI stack. This race is not simply about global competitive advantage but about whose policies and values will shape global norms. The Trump administration’s AI Action Plan charts a wise course to addressing this challenge. But congressional action will be needed to get this job done.
Forthcoming R Street analysis will examine other elements of the AI Action Plan, including what it proposed for cybersecurity, energy, and speech-related matters, among other things.