Donald Trump is the 47th President of the United States, in office since January 2025, and previously served as the 45th President (2017–2021). He is a Republican. His AI policy spans both terms: the first presidential executive order specifically on AI in 2019, and a second-term agenda built around rescinding the Biden administration's omnibus AI executive order and replacing it with a deregulatory, export-oriented framework.
Background
Trump returned to office in January 2025. His second-term AI agenda is shaped by a group of advisers including David Sacks (AI & Crypto Czar), Michael Kratsios (OSTP Director), and Vice President JD Vance. The administration frames AI policy in terms of winning a strategic race: accelerating domestic deployment, contesting China on compute and models, and limiting what it views as overreaching state-level or Biden-era regulation.
AI policy actions
First-term executive order (2019)
Trump signed Executive Order 13859 ("Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence") in February 2019, the first presidential executive order specifically on AI. It launched the "American AI Initiative" and established early federal AI R&D and workforce priorities. Kratsios, then OSTP Deputy CTO, was a principal author.
Rescission of EO 14110 and second-term framework
On his first day in office in January 2025, Trump rescinded Executive Order 14110, the Biden administration's October 2023 omnibus AI executive order. The rescission removed the affirmative obligations on frontier developers (Defense Production Act reporting), agency implementation deadlines, and parts of the federal AI safety architecture that had been built on EO 14110's authorities.
As the affirmative replacement for EO 14110, Trump signed Executive Order 14365 ("Removing Barriers to American Leadership in AI"). EO 14365 redirects federal AI policy toward deregulation, export expansion of US AI systems, and federal pushback on state-level AI rules perceived as burdensome.
Trump also approved and issued America's AI Action Plan, a cross-agency strategy document operationalizing EO 14365. It emphasizes compute buildout, export promotion, federal preemption of state AI laws, and contestation of Chinese AI ascendance, and is the most detailed second-term expression of the administration's AI doctrine.
Multilateral AI diplomacy
At the Paris AI Action Summit in February 2025, the administration, represented by VP Vance, declined to sign the Paris AI Action Summit Declaration, departing from US participation in the prior Bletchley and Seoul commitments and marking a retreat from multilateral safety-focused AI diplomacy.
Positions and statements
The second-term Trump AI posture treats AI primarily as a strategic competition with China, an economic-growth vector, and a domain where federal and state regulation should be minimized. This is a break from the Biden-era risk-management framing embodied by EO 14110 and the US-UK AI Safety Institute architecture.
Asked in the Oval Office on July 29, 2026 about the OpenAI agent that intruded into Hugging Face's infrastructure, Trump said "We're looking at controls," adding that he did not want to "restrict" AI developers from building new products (Source: reuters.com).
In a Punchbowl News interview published August 7, 2026, Trump said Congress wants to regulate the AI industry "out of business," criticising proposals that have accumulated on Capitol Hill without advancing, among them a bill requiring developers of the most powerful models to submit them for independent security audits. The reporting does not name that bill. The interview appeared the same day NIST proposed federal guidelines for evaluating AI systems and opened them for public comment (Source: yahoo.com). See AI Kill Switch Act (Lieu–Moran), AI Pre-Release Vetting.
Sources
- EO 13859 and source summary
- EO 14365 and source summary
- America's AI Action Plan and source summary
- Paris AI Action Summit Declaration (2025) and source summary
- EO 14110 (rescinded) and source summary
Relationships
- supersedes: Executive Order 14365 — Ensuring a National Policy Framework for AI supersedes Executive Order 14110 — Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy AI; Trump rescinded the latter and issued the former.
- related: America's AI Action Plan — signed.
- related: Executive Order 13859 — Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence — first-term AI EO.
- contradicts: Joe Biden on AI regulation: rescission of EO 14110 is the defining break.
- contradicts: Paris AI Action Summit Declaration (2025) — US declined to sign.
- related: David Sacks, Michael Kratsios, JD Vance — principal second-term AI advisers.
- instance-of: AI Race Dynamics — Trump administration AI posture is the clearest US expression of the race frame.