Voters in the US have decided: Donald Trump will return to the White House in January. The change of administration has created some question marks around what could come next for any nascent regulatory regime around generative AI in Washington.
The likely answer is that strong, large-scale AI regulation will remain paused for the foreseeable future. Trump has vowed to reverse President Joe Biden’s signature achievement on the issue—a wide-ranging executive order. And experts say that a big legislative push, which was already in a holding pattern during election season, isn’t likely to pick up steam again under Republican control, though there have been reports of a potential lame-duck rush before Trump takes office.
Despite counting Vice President-elect JD Vance and a few GOP members of Congress as fans, Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan will likely lose her job as the agency backs off of its aggressive stance on M&A, experts said. That would probably mean an end to the FTC’s antitrust investigations into partnerships between tech giants and flush AI startups, like Microsoft and OpenAI or Amazon and Anthropic.
Those are guesses from experts about what the administration is not going to do. But there are still many unknowns about what efforts to guardrail AI might look like under Trump, who last held the presidency when commercial AI still largely meant traditional machine learning, and ChatGPT had yet to send the world into a frenzy.
New priorities: Trump’s Republican party is likely to focus any AI legislative action on bolstering economic growth and ensuring the country’s place in the global AI arms race over issues like safety risks, antitrust concerns, and consumer protections, according to Sanjay Puri, founder of Knowledge Networks.
“What [I’ve heard] in my conversations that I’ve had across both sides is that the executive order is gone,” Puri told Tech Brew, “and then you are probably going to see a light touch on the regulations, more focused on innovation and national security. You keep hearing from many different people that this is vital to our national security.”
Kristian Stout, director of innovation policy at the International Center for Law & Economics, said he’s encouraged by the fact that AI policy discussions aren’t as fiercely partisan as some other issues. Bipartisan-sponsored bills addressing specific AI issues like media rights and nonconsensual adult imagery are currently working through Congress, for instance. The so-called “AI Gang”—four senators who have positioned themselves as leaders of the legislative push—are two Democrats and two Republicans.
Keep up with the innovative tech transforming business
Tech Brew keeps business leaders up-to-date on the latest innovations, automation advances, policy shifts, and more, so they can make informed decisions about tech.
“This is not really a partisan issue, so I don’t expect there to be culture war fights around this. I think it’s going to be very technocratic, which is what it should be,” Stout told Tech Brew.
Free speech? That said, AI has certainly intersected with various cultural flashpoints in the past. Senator Ted Cruz has decried “woke” AI safety rules from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and claimed that the Biden executive order on AI censors free speech. The GOP platform states support for “AI development rooted in free speech and human flourishing.”
Depending on how that free speech focus plays out, it could cause problems for big tech platforms that rely on AI for content moderation, according to Shawn Helms, co-head of the Technology Transactions & Outsourcing Practice at law firm McDermott Will & Emery.
“The only way companies like Meta and TikTok are able to do any sort of content moderation is through the use of AI,” Helms said. “You kind of can’t do content moderation without AI.”
The Musk wildcard: One of Trump’s most involved surrogates could also throw a wrench in all of the above, depending on how much say he has in the administration’s AI policy. Elon Musk has often taken idiosyncratic stances on AI regulation and is well-known for his doomsday thinking around the tech. He was perhaps the only tech mogul in Silicon Valley to come out in favor of California’s AI safety bill this fall before Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed it.
“All of that’s sort of the overstory, and then you throw Elon Musk into the mix,” Helms said. “There is maybe no louder voice for regulation of artificial intelligence in the United States of America than Elon Musk.”
State power: US AI regulation has already started shaping up into something of a patchwork of different rules across different jurisdictions. Expect that to accelerate under Trump as states aim to fill regulatory gaps that the federal government won’t, or simply chart their own course, experts said.
While some states might decide to vie for tech company investments in AI infrastructure like data centers, Puri said others will likely try to take up the mantle of AI regulation.
“The states and the governors were looking to see how things shaped out here,” Puri said. “So, whether it’s on the privacy bills or the AI bills, I think you’re going to see just a tremendous amount of activity,” Puri said.