U.S. Accelerates AI Race With Deregulation, Exports
The White House has unveiled its AI action plan, with more than 90 measures and three executive orders. It prioritizes data centers, tech exports and ideological criteria for federal procurement.
Donald Trump’s administration unveiled its America’s AI Action Plan on Wednesday, a roadmap with more than 90 federal measures aimed at strengthening the United States’ position against China in artificial intelligence. The plan combines fewer regulatory hurdles, faster infrastructure buildout and a foreign policy focused on exporting U.S. technology.
The White House is pairing the document with three executive orders: one to streamline data-center permits, another to promote exports of the U.S. technology ecosystem and a third conditioning federal purchases of large language models on ideological-neutrality standards.
Three fronts in the AI race
The plan organizes its measures around three pillars: accelerating innovation, building AI infrastructure and leading international diplomacy and security.
The first calls for reducing rules that Washington views as obstacles for businesses. The administration wants to review federal regulations that could slow the development and deployment of AI systems, promote scientific research, make it easier for companies to adopt the technology and strengthen workforce training for jobs tied to the industry.
The policy shift is clear. In January, Trump revoked Joe Biden’s executive order on AI, which imposed notification and reporting requirements for certain safety results on developers of certain dual-use foundation models, as well as on U.S. infrastructure-as-a-service providers and certain foreign resellers, in connection with certain transactions. The new strategy shifts the emphasis from preventive oversight to the ability to build, train and commercialize systems at scale.
That does not mean the document ignores safety. The White House continues to prioritize cybersecurity, critical infrastructure protection and control of sensitive technologies. But it frames those goals as part of geopolitical competition, not as a reason to slow the domestic market.
Faster permits for data centers and energy
Computing capacity has become one of AI’s decisive resources. Training and operating advanced models requires thousands of chips, high-speed networks, water for cooling and, above all, a steady supply of electricity.
The executive order on infrastructure seeks to speed up procedures for data centers and other high-performance computing facilities. It also aims to improve coordination among federal agencies, facilitate the use of federal land and shorten review timelines for projects that combine computing capacity with power generation.
The goal addresses a real bottleneck: Big Tech companies and data-center operators are competing for connections to the power grid in regions across the country. A faster permitting policy may accelerate investment, but it does not by itself eliminate the grid’s physical constraints, transformer availability or local opposition to new plants and transmission lines.
The environmental impact could also become a point of friction. The plan prioritizes expanding energy capacity for AI, while affected communities and state regulators retain significant authority over water, land, electricity and construction.
Exporting the full stack, not just chips
The second executive order gives the plan an international dimension. The United States wants to sell allied and partner countries a complete AI stack: chips, data centers, models, software, applications, standards and cybersecurity services.
The idea matters because the debate over AI exports has so far often focused on advanced semiconductors and restricting access to them in China. The White House is also proposing a commercial and diplomatic offering: if other countries need AI infrastructure and tools, Washington wants them to rely on U.S. providers and technical standards aligned with its interests.
To that end, the plan calls for coordination among the Commerce Department, the State Department, the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) and the Export-Import Bank of the United States (EXIM). Financing will be important: a large-scale data center requires investments that many emerging markets cannot afford through software purchases alone.
This strategy could benefit U.S. chipmakers, cloud operators, model developers and cybersecurity companies. It also deepens the global technology divide: countries that adopt U.S. infrastructure could become more closely tied to its export controls and security framework.
Ideological neutrality enters public procurement
The third executive order requires federal agencies to procure large language models that comply with principles of truth-seeking and ideological neutrality. The White House argues that systems should not incorporate across-the-board political bias into their responses.
The measure turns a cultural dispute over chatbots into a public-procurement rule. Its immediate scope is limited to providers seeking to sell certain models to the federal government, but its impact could extend further: the administration is one of the world’s largest technology buyers, and its requirements could influence how companies document, evaluate and fine-tune their systems.
The practical challenge will be defining what counts as neutrality in a probabilistic model. Language models do not retrieve a single truth from a database; they generate text from learned patterns and safety rules configured by their creators. Requiring objective answers is reasonable in areas such as public services, science or law, but translating that principle into contracts will require concrete tests and criteria that can withstand technical and legal review.
An industrial policy with China as its reference point
The plan does not treat AI as an isolated technology sector. It presents AI as economic, military and diplomatic infrastructure, comparable in strategic importance to energy, telecommunications or semiconductors.
The agencies’ next decisions will determine its real reach: which permits are shortened, which projects receive federal support, which countries gain access to export packages and how the new procurement rule is applied. The roadmap leaves one priority unmistakable: the United States wants the global expansion of AI to be built, to the greatest extent possible, on American technology.
