AI industry could see regulation rollback under Trump

Targeting AI

President-elect Donald Trump during his election campaign offered clues about how his administration would handle the fast-growing AI sector.

One thing is clear: AI, to the extent that it is regulated, is headed for deregulation.

"It's likely going to mean less regulation for the AI industry," said Makenzie Holland, senior news writer at TechTarget Editorial covering tech regulation and compliance, on the Targeting AI podcast. "Being against regulation and [for] deregulation is a huge theme across his platform."

Trump views rules and regulations on business as costly and burdensome, Holland noted. The former president and longtime businessman's outlook presumably includes independent AI vendors and the tech giants that also develop and sell the powerful generative AI models that have swept the tech world.

President Joe Biden's wide-ranging executive order on AI has been the strongest articulation of how the federal government views AI policy. However, it's unclear which elements of the Democratic president's plan Trump will scrap and which he'll keep. Trump established the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Office at the end of his first term as president in 2021.

David Nicholson, chief technology advisor at Futurum Group, said on the podcast that Trump will likely retain some aspects of the executive order with bipartisan support. Among these is the federal government's recognition that it should guide and promote AI technology.

"[Trump will] definitely not scrap it wholesale," Nicholson said. "There's something behind a lot of those concerns ... and pretty bipartisan concern that AI is a genie that we only want to let out of the bottle, if possible, very carefully."

Holland, however, doesn't expect many regulatory proposals in Biden's executive order to survive the next Trump presidency. Trump is also likely to dramatically de-emphasize the AI safety concerns and regulatory proposals that feature prominently in Biden's executive order, she said.

Meanwhile, concerning Elon Musk -- a major Trump backer and owner of the social media platform X, formerly Twitter, and generative AI vendor xAI -- the issue is complicated, Nicholson said.

Musk has been a trenchant critic of xAI competitor OpenAI, alleging in a lawsuit that the rival vendor abandoned its commitment to openness in AI technology. However, Nicholson noted that Musk's definition of transparency in training large language models is unorthodox, insisting that models be "honest" and not contain political bias.

"Having the ear of the president and the administration, I think he could be meaningful in that regard," Nicholson said. "[Musk] is going to be the loudest voice in the room when it comes to a lot of this stuff."

While Trump is expected to try to reverse or ignore much of Biden's agenda, one major piece of bipartisan legislation passed during Biden's tenure, the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, is likely to survive because it emphasizes reviving manufacturing and technology development in the U.S., Nicholson said.

But the Federal Trade Commission's and Department of Justice's active stances on AI rulemaking and big tech regulation -- the DOJ successfully sued Google for monopolizing the search engine business -- are ripe for a Trump rollback.

"The FTC is likely to face a shake-up, as far as Lina Khan's job probably is on the line," Holland said, referring to the activist FTC chair, who has vigorously pursued a number of big tech vendors.

"Trump's entire platform is about deregulation and being against regulation. That's automatically going to impact these enforcement agencies, which, in some capacity, can make their own rules," Holland said.

In the absence of meaningful federal regulation of AI, the U.S. is moving toward a state-by-state regulatory patchwork.

Shaun Sutner is senior news director for TechTarget Editorial's information management team, driving coverage of artificial intelligence, unified communications, analytics and data management technologies. Esther Ajao is a TechTarget Editorial news writer and podcast host covering artificial intelligence software and systems. Together, they host the Targeting AI podcast series.