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On his first day in office in January 2025, Trump rescinded Executive Order 14110, the Biden administration's October 2023 omnibus AI executive order.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.
On September 19, 2026 Trump wrote on Truth Social that "I am forming the AI Force, much like I did Space Force, which has been a tremendous SUCCESS, in my First Term," and said he was also recruiting an AI czar. The post followed several weeks of public safety warnings from industry figures and polling showing growing voter opposition to AI. The retrievable coverage does not state the proposed unit's authorities, staffing or host department. The AI czar role had previously been held by David Sacks, who stepped down from it to co-chair the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology while remaining a senior AI policy adviser (Source: wsj.com). In the same post Trump rejected concerns about AI's risks to humans as a hoax, comparing them to the alarm over climate change and to the scandals that led to his two first-term impeachments, and wrote: "We will not in any way hinder or stifle the Growth of this incredible Industry" (Source: bloomberg.com; businessinsider.com). He said the AI Force would "cherish" the technology while tackling harms through the existing criminal justice system, without elaborating, said "Radical Left Democrats" were "going straight at AI," and invited "High I.Q." individuals to apply for the czar position (Source: axios.com).
The announcement caught White House advisers by surprise, according to sources cited by Axios on September 21, 2026, and officials and executives inside and outside the administration began seeking the czar role; the sources said the czar would likely be a seasoned surrogate with Silicon Valley ties who could lead an effort to rebrand AI. Axios listed as names to watch Office of Personnel Management director Scott Kupor (OPM — Office of Personnel Management (AI Deployer)); former senior White House AI policy adviser Sriram Krishnan; Social Capital founder and 8090 chief executive Chamath Palihapitiya; national cyber director Sean Cairncross; and Pentagon chief technology officer and under secretary for research and engineering Emil Michael, whom it described as an easy fit if the AI Force were housed at the Pentagon. Axios noted that special government employees are barred by law from participating "personally and substantially" in matters in which they have a financial interest, so divestment requirements could rule out anyone holding stakes in Anthropic or OpenAI, both preparing initial public offerings; people close to Sacks, who served as a special government employee until March 2026, said he likely would not take the role again. No czar had been named as of September 21 (Source: axios.com). After Semafor and Reuters reported that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was under consideration, Trump wrote on Truth Social on September 25 that Bessent "will not be going to be Super Intelligence (SI) Czar" because "he doesn't want to" and because Trump wanted to keep him at Treasury (Source: cnbc.com).
In his address to the UN General Assembly on September 22, 2026, Trump said the United States "totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much now," and that all US documents would henceforth use "super intelligence" in place of "artificial intelligence" (Source: theverge.com). He also said the Department of Justice would oversee the technology's responsible development (Source: insideaipolicy.com). By September 22, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had emerged as the frontrunner for the AI czar post, with OSTP Director Michael Kratsios and OPM Director Scott Kupor also under consideration, according to three people familiar with the matter; Trump's decision was not final (Source: semafor.com).
Trump hosted Xi Jinping for talks at the White House on September 24, 2026, during Xi's state visit, following Trump's own visit to Beijing in May. According to the readout published by China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Trump said that "AI concerns the future of humanity" and that the United States and China "should maintain dialogue and strengthen cooperation on AI," while Xi called for continuing the two sides' dialogue on AI and jointly preventing "the misuse and abuse of AI." The readout reports a new economic and trade "joint arrangement" and describes no specific AI agreement or incident-notification mechanism (Chinese MFA readout: President Xi Jinping Holds Talks with U.S. President Donald J. Trump (September 24, 2026)). Axios reported that Trump entered the AI discussions "showing little interest" in doing much (Source: axios.com). See US-China AI Competition: Different Races, Different Metrics.
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.
Asked by reporters on September 10, 2026 as he departed Dallas whether he has concerns about AI leading to human extinction, Trump said, "No, I don't have any," describing his paramount interest as maintaining an edge over China (Source: bloomberg.com). The remark was made during the week in which Senate negotiators were drafting a duty-of-care standard that would let the federal government block release of models deemed unsafe, and two days before Dario Amodei called for frontier developers to slow the rate of capability improvement (We Must Pace the Frontier (Amodei, September 2026)). See AI Existential Risk, AI Pre-Release Vetting.
Answering reporters at Trump International Golf Links in Doonbeg, County Clare, Ireland on September 13, 2026 — asked whether the AI industry should slow down or face more regulation, the day after three frontier-laboratory heads endorsed Amodei's pacing essay — Trump said: "We're leading China in AI. We're the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI wins." He added: "We could put guardrails. We can do this and that. But I think you have a lot of very negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn't be bringing it up and they're bringing up things that won't happen" (Source: reuters.com).
He hardened that position the following day. In a Truth Social post on September 14, 2026 Trump wrote that the only guardrail AI needs is a strong and smart president, that the United States already holds criminal and regulatory power over AI companies, and that a "SICK conspiracy" against AI and data centers benefits only China (Source: reuters.com). The three statements of September 10, 13 and 14 track an escalation in framing across five days — from disclaiming concern, to attributing exaggerated concerns to "negative forces," to characterising the criticism as a conspiracy — while the underlying policy position, that the competition with China governs and existing executive authority suffices, is unchanged. The post came the same day House Speaker Mike Johnson said Congress would not lead on the question and a spokesperson for Germany's digital ministry called for both the United States and China to be involved in oversight.
On the same day he telephoned into a live All-In Summit 2026 interview with Jensen Huang in Los Angeles, which Huang put on speakerphone for the audience. Trump told the audience that AI risk is "all a hoax," that "the robots are not going to be taking over the world," that data centers are "the oil of the next 20, 25 years," and that opponents of data-center construction were "playing right into the hands" of parties that do not want them built (Source: indiatoday.in). Coverage of the Truth Social post records the guardrail line as "the only control or 'guardrails' that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT," and records him grouping the claim that AI will take over the world with the Russia investigation, climate change and his impeachments as hoaxes (Source: axios.com). The text of one post of September 14, reproduced in a second Axios account, opens: "Concerning AI, when, in the History of Business, did anyone see the Leaders of an Industry call for Regulation that, if strongly implemented, will drive them into oblivion and bankruptcy? AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX, no different from RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA — UKRAINE, UKRAINE, UKRAINE — IMPEACHMENT HOAX #1 — IMPEACHMENT HOAX #2." The same post said China would "be doing absolutely nothing to stand in the way of AI," objected that Google wanted to build "a massive Plant in Finland" because of US permitting difficulty, and called AI and data centers "the Greatest Economic Development Engine in History" (Source: axios.com). Coverage of the All-In call renders his line to the audience as "the robots will not be taking over" (Source: axios.com).
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.
- related: Chinese MFA readout: President Xi Jinping Holds Talks with U.S. President Donald J. Trump (September 24, 2026) — Chinese readout of the September 24, 2026 talks with Xi
- instance-of: AI Race Dynamics — Trump administration AI posture is the clearest US expression of the race frame.