Winning the AI Race Part 5: President Trump on the AI Action Plan

Trump’s AI program was industrial policy as much as technology policy: build data centers, chips, transmission and power faster. The infrastructure order signed that day accelerates federal permitting, opens federal land and resources, and allows financial support for qualifying projects. (The White House)

The administration wants the full American AI stack—not merely chips—to become the default abroad. A second order created an export program covering hardware, cloud and data infrastructure, models, cybersecurity and applications, with government tools including loans, guarantees and technical assistance. (The White House)

Federal purchasing power will be used to push AI vendors toward the administration’s definition of ideological neutrality. The procurement order requires contracted LLMs to satisfy “truth-seeking” and “ideological neutrality” principles, with vendors potentially bearing decommissioning costs for uncured noncompliance. (The White House)

Trump explicitly argued that AI training should not require payment or contracts with every author or publisher whose work is read. He distinguished learning from copying or plagiarism, framing broad access to books and articles as necessary for competition with China; the speech itself did not change copyright law.

Trump also called for one federal AI standard that would supersede differing state rules. His argument was that the strictest state could otherwise become the effective national regulator and expose developers to overlapping litigation; this was a policy demand in the speech, not one of the three orders signed onstage.

Trump said he initially considered breaking up Nvidia, then abandoned the idea after being told a serious rival effort could still take roughly a decade to catch it. In his telling, Nvidia’s extraordinary technical lead—not a detailed antitrust analysis—was what persuaded him to move on.

The administration expects major AI developers increasingly to become power producers rather than ordinary grid customers. Trump said companies could build their own generation and sell excess electricity back to the grid, while presenting nuclear, gas, oil and coal expansion as necessary to meet AI’s extraordinary electricity demand.