Trump Wins Election, Signals Deregulatory Shift on AI

Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election today, a result the tech sector had spent months bracing for as a turning point in America's approach to artificial intelligence policy. Throughout the campaign, the Republican candidate and his team made clear that dismantling much of the regulatory framework built under the Biden administration would be a top priority, replacing it with an approach geared toward accelerating domestic development and outpacing China.

What's on the table

The clearest evidence of that promise is the 2024 Republican Party platform, which explicitly called for revoking the executive order on artificial intelligence that Joe Biden signed in October 2023. That order — the first of its kind in the United States — required major AI companies to share safety test results for their most powerful models with the federal government and tasked the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) with developing risk-assessment standards. The Republican platform branded these measures a barrier to innovation, driven by what it called ideological notions detached from technological development.

J.D. Vance, the vice president-elect, positioned himself during his time in the Senate as one of the sharpest critics of European-style regulatory frameworks, going so far as to warn against exporting the EU's AI Act model to the United States. His arrival at the White House reinforces expectations that the new administration will pursue a looser framework, leaning on industry self-regulation rather than legal reporting requirements.

The awkward wrinkle: Elon Musk

The equation gets complicated by the presence of Elon Musk, one of the most visible backers of the Trump campaign and founder of xAI, a direct OpenAI rival. Musk has previously championed far more cautious positions on the risks of advanced AI, including his support for California's controversial SB 1047, which sought to impose safety obligations on the largest-scale models. How that tension between the party's deregulatory wing and Musk's warnings about the technology's existential risks gets resolved will be one of the new administration's first internal power struggles.

China, the other front

The second emerging pillar is a more aggressive stance toward China on technology. The Biden administration had already imposed progressively tighter export restrictions on advanced semiconductors — Nvidia chips used to train large AI models have been subject to controls since late 2022, expanded further in 2023 — in an effort to slow the Asian giant's progress in both military and civilian AI. Trump has repeatedly said on the campaign trail that he would tighten those barriers even further and pair them with sweeping tariffs, framing the issue as strategic competition that extends well beyond the tech industry.

What changes for the industry

For U.S. AI companies, the campaign's message points to fewer transparency requirements around safety testing and less friction in bringing models to market. For advocates of stricter regulation, Trump's victory marks a setback just as Biden's executive order was beginning to produce the first mandatory reporting frameworks. And on the geopolitical rivalry with China, the election outcome cements a trend already underway under the previous administration: chip export controls are likely to persist — and possibly tighten further — while the rules governing how models are built and tested on U.S. soil could loosen considerably in the coming months.