America’s AI Action Plan: How to Build Big Brother While Warning Against Him
This week, let’s consider the White House’s latest release on artificial intelligence (AI), "Winning the AI Race: America's AI Action Plan" issued pursuant to the President’s January executive order on "Removing Barriers to American Leadership in AI."
Overview
America’s AI Action Plan structures federal AI policy around three primary areas of focus: Accelerating Innovation, Building American AI Infrastructure, and Leading in International Diplomacy and Security. These pillars purport to represent a whole-of-government approach to AI leadership that spans domestic development, infrastructure investment, and international engagement.
Key Policy Initiatives include:
Regulatory Reform: The Plan focuses on removing “onerous Federal regulations” that hinder AI development and deployment and seeks private sector input on rules to remove. This deregulatory approach marks a departure from previous AI governance frameworks.
Content Neutrality Requirements: The Plan includes updating Federal procurement guidelines to ensure that the USG only contracts with frontier large language model developers who ensure that their systems are “objective and free from top-down ideological bias.”
AI Export Strategy: The Commerce and State Departments will partner with industry to deliver secure, full-stack AI export packages – including hardware, models, software, applications, and standards – to America's allies around the world.
Infrastructure Development: The Plan calls for expediting and modernizing permits for data centers and semiconductor manufacturing facilities, as well as creating new national initiatives to increase high-demand occupations like electricians and HVAC technicians. Officials framed the initiative in terms of economic competition and national security. “AI and Crypto Czar” David Sacks emphasized that "to remain the leading economic and military power, the United States must win the AI race" and noted the need to "center American workers and avoid Orwellian uses of AI." Secretary of State Marco Rubio characterized winning the AI race as "non-negotiable" for protecting economic and national security interests.
The Administration’s Perspective
Officials framed the initiative in terms of economic competition and national security. “AI and Crypto Czar” David Sacks emphasized that "to remain the leading economic and military power, the United States must win the AI race" and noted the need to "center American workers and avoid Orwellian uses of AI." Secretary of State Marco Rubio characterized winning the AI race as "non-negotiable" for protecting economic and national security interests.
To review those quotes, please click on the following link:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/07/white-house-unveils-americas-ai-action-plan/
To comprehensively review America’s AI Action Plan for yourself, please click on the following link:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Americas-AI-Action-Plan.pdf
Our Thoughts
America’s AI Action Plan offers a study in policy paradox. Here are the highlights:
Deregulation Meets New Regulation: The Plan simultaneously promises to remove "onerous Federal regulations" while creating new federal procurement guidelines, export requirements, and infrastructure mandates. The irony: Existing safety rules are "onerous," but new compliance frameworks to meet administration-defined standards for "objectivity" and freedom from "ideological bias" are apparently essential policy tools, and we expect will be onerous themselves – without the safety emphasis. A further irony is that it now looks like AI will take the lead in deciding which regulations to delete. You can read more about that by clicking on the following recently updated report about how DOGE has built an AI to delete half of federal regulations: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesbroughel/2025/07/28/doge-built-an-ai-to-delete-half-of-federal-regulations-will-it-work/
The Free Speech Paradox: The plan promises to uphold "free speech in frontier models" by ensuring USG contracts only go to AI developers whose systems are "objective and free from top-down ideological bias." The irony: A government agency—itself quintessentially "top-down"—will determine what constitutes freedom from ideological bias. Federal bureaucrats are tasked with defining objectivity, a challenge that has vexed philosophers since the beginning of time, while assuming private AI developers are inherently biased.
Export Security Contradiction: The Plan positions AI as critical to national security while planning to export "full-stack AI packages" to allies worldwide. If AI dominance is essential to national security, why export the capabilities that provide competitive advantage? The exported AI must somehow be sophisticated enough to benefit allies but not so advanced as to compromise American dominance—a technological Goldilocks feat.
Anti-Orwellian Orwellianism: The warning against "Orwellian uses of AI" sounds out at the precise moment that the government is building a system that Orwell would have recognized: a government that defines what constitutes "objective" thought and controls the technological infrastructure to enforce those definitions. The administration is essentially constructing a centralized AI apparatus while cautioning against centralized AI control. For more details on that, you can read the following linked article by Wired: https://www.wired.com/story/doge-collecting-immigrant-data-surveil-track/
Missing the Point: Most tellingly, the Action Plan sidesteps the safety and rights-based concerns that have motivated AI governance frameworks worldwide. The EU's AI Act, for example, establishes a comprehensive risk-based approach that categorizes AI systems based on their potential to harm "safety, livelihoods and rights of people," banning systems that pose "unacceptable risks" and requiring extensive safety measures for "high-risk" applications like employment screening, law enforcement, and healthcare. The EU framework specifically prohibits cognitive manipulation, biometric categorization systems, and social scoring—precisely the kinds of invasive government applications the Plan appears positioned to enable.
In the end, America's AI Action Plan succeeds at one thing: proving that the greatest threat to objective, bias-free artificial intelligence may not be the technology itself, but the politicians who claim to protect us from it.
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Hosch & Morris, PLLC is a boutique law firm dedicated to data privacy and protection, cybersecurity, the Internet and technology. Open the Future℠.