CEI experts react to White House AI Action Plan

Today, the White House released “Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan”, a multi-faceted policy document intended to help the United States keep its competitive advantage over China in Artificial Intelligence development. The plan includes three “pillars,” including “Accelerate AI Innovation,” “Build American AI Infrastructure,” and “Lead in International AI Diplomacy and Security.”

CEI experts on issues ranging from AI and tech to energy policy to economics reacted to the newly released plan.  

Director of CEI’s Center for Technology and Innovation Jessica Melugin said:

“It’s a mixed bag from the White House on AI policy. The administration moves in the right direction with pushbacks on state regulation of AI, correctly identifying the risks to innovation from a fifty-state patchwork of compliance costs and obligations. It’s also smart to review Federal Trade Commission actions that could undermine AI investment from the nation’s top tech companies. Getting superfluous ‘woke’ aspects out of AI is a reasonable course correction, but how and who will sort bias, discrimination, and ‘woke’ from minority opinion, skepticism, or preference remains to be seen. The administration also places too much faith in what can be predicted and funded efficiently. Efforts to slash red tape here deserve praise, but other parts of the plan risk creating more of that same red tape.”

Research Fellow Paige Lambermont said:

“America’s AI action plan proposes steps to streamline permitting to secure the power necessary for this transformative technology. Only so much of this can be done by executive power alone. The plan recommends categorical exclusions for data-center-related action with minimal environmental impact and expanding the use of the FAST-41 process to speed project approvals. It also recommends expediting Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act permitting for certain types of projects. These recommended actions seek to make the approval of new projects easier, but are limited in scope, as Congressional action is necessary to truly reform the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the interconnected web of other laws that slow the permitting of energy projects in the United States.

“The Plan rightfully states that the Trump administration has reformed NEPA regulations across the federal government. This broad-based focus is precisely what is needed when it comes to permitting reform. AI is certainly important but permitting reform should be broad-based, requiring major changes to the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, and NEPA, among other laws. Broad-based permitting reform will help our nation to develop critical infrastructure and energy projects and benefit industries and specific projects across the economy, including those related to AI.”

Fred L. Smith Fellow in Regulatory Studies Wayne Crews said:

“While the Trump administration’s ringing appeal to ‘Remove Red Tape and Onerous Regulation’ and pivot away from Biden-era compulsory woke AI are urgently needed and commendable, elements of the Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan and the executive orders reinforcing it may entrench certain foundational problems that plagued prior directives from Biden and Trump himself: they risk inappropriately centralizing certain elements of AI oversight, deployment, infrastructure and funding within Washington.

“From potentially federalizing data center siting to subsidizing AI exports through the Ex-Im Bank and expanding DHS and NIST roles, some components of the plan risk entrenching elements of the swampy, innovation-stifling administrative state that the broader Trump deregulatory agenda rightly and uniquely targets for deconstruction and ostensibly would do here. Federal steering of the sector can also disrupt emergent, vital, and necessary risk-management standards, given Washington’s tendency to indemnify well-positioned partners, and it ought to be noted, given the militarization of AI that makes up the background hum of the industry. Leading with un-woke AI is great, but it won’t necessarily result in a libertarian leap forward in light-touch governance when so much AI is federally funded, and when carrots and sticks rather than competitive free enterprise and disciplines set the basic agenda. AI governance should prioritize limiting government power over the sector, not scaling it in a way that will prove exploitable by tomorrow’s progressives.”

Senior Economist Ryan Young said:

“Corporate welfare and slower innovation are the two dominant themes in the AI Action Plan’s export policies.

“Companies may find it more profitable to court favor with the Export-Import Bank and similar agencies than to design better technology. Corporate welfare in the form of subsidies and trade protectionism might please shareholders in the short run, but at the cost of innovation.

“The plan’s push for international AI standards is similar to the European Union’s stultifying regulatory harmonization, which, among other things, is locking the continent into USB-C technology for years to come, even as better technologies emerge.

“The lure of corporate welfare, combined with locking in today’s primitive AI technology, amounts to America surrendering its AI advantages without a fight to rivals like China, on purpose.

“This is the story of protectionism and industrial policy every time they are tried. Technologies change, but principles of sound policy do not. Politicians’ big plans will always fail to deliver on their promises.”