White House Unveils Push to Speed AI Development

President Donald Trump gave his first major speech about artificial intelligence. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

President Donald Trump signed three executive orders at an event Wednesday afternoon where he detailed the administration’s action plan on artificial intelligence.

“From this day forward, it’s going to be a policy of the United States to lead the world in artificial intelligence,” Trump said during his speech.

The White House said earlier Wednesday that winning the AI race will usher in a “new golden age of human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security for the American people.” It released a 26-page document outlining plans for more than 90 federal policy actions in coming months.

The administration is taking a hands-off approach to AI regulation, and said its efforts are aimed at “accelerating innovation, building American AI infrastructure, and leading in international diplomacy and security.”

Trump’s first major speech on AI comes amid an AI arms race among Silicon Valley’s biggest tech companies. Alphabet’s Google, Microsoft , Meta Platforms , and Amazon are racing to build AI data centers, creating a massive explosion in demand for computing power and infrastructure that has also put a strain on local electric power grids.

Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang, AMD Chair and CEO Lisa Su, and Palantir Technologies Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar were seated in the front row during the event billed as an AI Summit.

Trump at one point during his speech said he doesn’t like the term “artificial intelligence” because “I don’t like anything that’s artificial. It’s not artificial; it’s genius.”

Ed Mills, Washington policy analyst at Raymond James, said the plan is structured around three pillars and provides a roadmap that “pairs deregulation and investment with export control changes, while unlocking over $100 billion in unused financing capacity” through the Export-Import Bank and U.S. International Development Finance Corporation to support AI exports.

Included among the broad initiatives the White House outlined ahead of the event, the Commerce and State Departments will work with industry to export American AI, including hardware, models, software, applications, and standards.

The administration also wants to expedite permits to rapidly build data centers and semiconductor fabs, and create new national initiatives to boost the occupations the AI industry will rely on as it expands, including the growing need for electricians and HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) technicians.

It also outlined plans to “remove onerous Federal regulations that hinder AI development and deployment, and seek private sector input on rules to remove,” and update 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.”

“To remain the leading economic and military power, the United States must win the AI race,” AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks said in a written statement. “To win the AI race, the U.S. must lead in innovation, infrastructure, and global partnerships. At the same time, we must center American workers and avoid Orwellian uses of AI.”

“President Trump believes it is non-negotiable that the United States wins the global AI race,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Wednesday afternoon at a White House briefing.

Ahead of the president’s remarks and signing on Wednesday, Daniel Castro, vice president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a tech policy think tank, called the plan a home run, telling MarketWatch: “It’s exactly what the country needs: A forward-looking agenda focused on rapidly developing and deploying AI at home while promoting American AI technology abroad.”

But Public Citizen, a left-leaning advocacy group, blasted the idea of the administration approving the rapid deployment of AI products and data centers “with no clear safeguards,” and by sidelining consumer protections, worker rights, and civil liberties to serve “Silicon Valley’s growth-at-any-cost agenda.”

Public Citizen Co-President Lisa Gilbert said the executive order could lead to the creation of “numerous sprawling, energy-hungry AI data centers without requiring environmental review or local input.”

Capital Alpha Partners’ analyst Robert Kaminski wrote in a research note that while the initiative and all the messaging around it read positively for the AI sector, its supporting components, and Big Tech generally, it’s not likely to solve some of Big Tech’s other issues. “We do not think the happy talk about AI this week translates into any realized material changes in the antitrust outlook for tech or the long-standing criticisms of the tech platforms in general,” he said.

Google, Apple, Meta, and Amazon have been fighting anticompetition lawsuits for years and there’s no sign of that being derailed, he said, nor are there signs of anti-tech critics in Congress and across the Republican party “becoming less vocal.”

Trump’s plan also calls for the federal government to withhold AI-related funding for states that have “burdensome AI regulations that waste these funds,” reviving an idea Republicans had proposed but couldn’t include in their tax-and-spending law.

Kaminski wrote that considering the recent focus on state AI laws, he was surprised that the plan proposes putting pressure on states with unfavorable AI regulatory environments, as well as the potential for the Federal Trade Commission or the Federal Communications Commission could possibly preempt the states.

— Anita Hamilton contributed to this report

Write to Janet H. Cho at janet.cho@dowjones.com