What do Paul McCartney, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, and Sam Altman have in common?
They are all among the many, many people who have proffered or co-signed opinions on what should be included in the Trump administration’s forthcoming strategy around AI.
The White House has vowed to craft a new AI Action Plan to replace former President Biden’s nixed executive order within around six months of the latter’s repeal in January. The administration invited public comment on the effort in February and received nearly 9,000 submissions before the deadline. Many of the groups and signatories behind those comments opted to share their letters publicly.
It seems that all corners of the business, culture, academic, and policy worlds have opinions, a testament to the breadth of impact AI policy stands to have.
There are the usual suspects: OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic each lobbied for their own visions. Hollywood creatives, musicians, authors, and newspaper and book publishers signed on to various letters calling for enforcement of copyright protections. Trade groups from American colleges and universities backed a push for more guardrails around educational settings. State governments and advocacy groups of various stripes also weighed in.
Ground rules: Despite the flood of input, the administration has already laid out some priorities to which it’s committed off the bat, like ensuring America’s leadership in the global race around AI, and sparing businesses any “unnecessarily burdensome requirements.”
Vice President JD Vance has also been clear about the White House’s intentions to back off from the “hand-wringing about safety,” and Trump’s executive order calls for “AI systems that are free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas.”
What the industry wants: China looms large across OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic’s submissions; they each frame their respective proposals in national security terms—OpenAI’s policy staff used the word “freedom” 22 times in its 15-page document.
What OpenAI needs to beat China, according to the company, largely amounts to lighter regulation. It wants the federal government to preempt the nearly 800 state laws it claims have already been proposed in US states this year, a stance consistent with OpenAI’s opposition last year to a wide-reaching California bill—the now-vetoed SB 1047.
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“This patchwork of regulations risks bogging down innovation and, in the case of AI, undermining America’s leadership position,” OpenAI’s policy staff wrote.
OpenAI and Google also pushed for laxer rules around access to copyrighted training data. And Google called for protection from liability in how its AI models may eventually be used—a big issue in the fight over California’s SB 1047 last year.
Anthropic, typically more safety-minded than its rivals, asked the government to develop better evaluation tools to gauge the risks of powerful new models and preserve the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) AI Safety Institute, which Trump officials were reportedly gearing up to gut.
Copyright concerns: Many media, publishing, and entertainment industry groups sent letters calling on the government to enforce protections against AI companies training models on copyrighted material.
More than 400 Hollywood actors, directors, producers, and some music artists signed a letter calling for enforcement of copyright protections over their work, couching the argument around Hollywood’s role in “American democratic influence and soft power abroad.” Alden Newspapers hit back at OpenAI and Google’s “self-serving proposals” around copyright, and Digital Content Next and the News Media Alliance calls for respecting intellectual property rights. The Association of American Publishers, Authors Guild, and Authors Alliance also joined the chorus.
What’s next: The Trump administration set a deadline of 180 days from the signing of the January executive order to draft the plan, which would mean we should expect it by late July. It remains to be seen how much of this input will be incorporated.