OSTP Chief: Exports a Key Part of AI Action Plan; Talk of Reviving Moratorium
Exports are a crucial part of the Trump administration's AI Action Plan, whose goal is for the U.S. to win the AI race, said Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, during a Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) event Wednesday. There's also the potential for a revival of the 10-year moratorium on enforcing state AI regulations in the action plan, an official said, though specifics weren't provided.
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“The issue that we face today is even more serious than the telecommunications problem that generally the West faces in the Global South,” Kratsios said. “If most countries around the world are running on an AI stack that isn't American and potentially one of an adversary, that's a really, really big problem.”
The goal is that, over time, “all the government data" will be "ingested into models to provide citizen services,” such as paying taxes or health care, he said. As such, “It would be a huge problem if the model that is fine-tuned to generate these AI solutions isn't from America.”
Gregory Allen, senior advisor at the Wadhwani AI Center at CSIS, said that in the past, China offered "turnkey solutions,” whereas America made customers “navigate that complexity of putting all the pieces together,” even if the tech was ultimately better. Kratsios said the AI Action Plan will address that issue through exporting AI.
In addition, Allen noted America must control exports so that they don’t end up in the wrong places, in addition to just increasing exports. Kratsios said, “We generally believe [that] the highest-end semiconductors need to continue to be export-controlled and not allowed into China, and that's important for our ability to maintain our leadership in this race.”
Though the 10-year moratorium on state enforcement of AI regulation was ultimately excluded from the reconciliation bill, there is movement to add something similar in the AI Action plan, Allen said, though specifics were not mentioned.
Kratsios said a patchwork of state regulations doesn’t make sense and is not pro-innovation, which is the position the Trump administration takes, but “how that plays out and how we're able to find consensus with the Hill remains to be determined.”
Along with this, “we need to continue to do better as a country on being able to enforce this stuff,” he said. “You can have the best export controls in the books, but if you're not able to effectively enforce them because you're resource constrained, that's a challenge.”
Regulation, Kratsios said, needs to be done by the sectors themselves to be sector-specific and risk-based. “The regulators at [the Food and Drug Administration] who are thinking about AI-powered medical diagnostics are the ones who should be doing regulations on AI-powered medical diagnostics, not some group somewhere else in government that is doing AI regs” generally, he said.
A Husch Blackwell blog post on the Action Plan from Friday said its “deregulatory posture is explicit.” The blog notes it “calls for the removal of ‘onerous regulation’ that impedes AI development and deployment," as well as directs federal agencies to potentially withhold discretionary funding from states with regulations that may hinder innovation (see 2507230058).
Despite this, Husch Blackwell said the plan still “introduces novel compliance challenges” that may raise confusion and constitutional questions.
A Morrison Foerster blog post from Wednesday agreed with Kratsios and Allen’s point about winning the AI race. “At their core, the AI Action Plan and accompanying Executive Orders focus on reducing or eliminating perceived obstacles to AI development that the administration believes will cause the U.S. to fall behind its competitors unless addressed,” it said.
The R Street Institute said the plan “appropriately emphasizes how important it is for the federal government to remain at the forefront of evaluating national risks in frontier models” in an analysis July 24. “The plan unequivocally establishes cybersecurity as a foundational priority -- not a mere compliance exercise or technical footnote, but an essential condition for scaling our progress, protecting our breakthroughs, and sustaining our momentum,” it said. “By embedding cybersecurity provisions throughout each of the plan’s three pillars, the Trump administration aptly recognizes that winning the AI race depends not only on being the first or best, but also on ensuring that our innovation is resilient, trustworthy, and secure at every stage of its lifecycle.”
Though Kratsios differentiated Trump’s AI Action Plan from the previous administration’s AI strategy documents, R Street noted that the plan is only the beginning. “While America’s AI Action Plan rightly recognizes that technology, policy, cybersecurity, energy, and the economy can no longer advance in silos, the true challenge lies in how these policy actions are implemented, sustained by stakeholders over time, and adapted to meet the evolving landscape of cybersecurity threats and emerging technologies,” said the analysis.
The White House released the plan last week (see 2507230058) after a comment period that ended in March (see 2502060031). Some attorneys noted that companies will need to meet strict security requirements under the plan (see 2507290047).