The Trump administration’s “AI Action Plan” will likely shape every aspect of AI development going forward, and OpenAI is seeking influence during its initial 180-day drafting phase. To that end it has submitted its own set of proposals to the White House Office of Science and Technology (OSTP), one that unsurprisingly calls for light AI regulations.
The proposal also touches on exporting AI rooted in democratic principles to the world as well as infrastructure needs, but the central focus is the company’s desire to loosen AI regulations by invoking the threat of losing competitive advantage to China. To that end the AI pioneer seeks a temporary waiver for FedRAMP for its industry members and increased right to train on copyrighted materials, among other measures.
OpenAI uses DeepSeek in pitch for loose AI regulations
The Trump AI Action Plan is a new measure replacing the Biden administration’s 2023 executive order on the subject. Trump’s order was established near the end of January and has set a period of 180 days for assorted federal agencies to convene and develop a replacement plan ultimately drafted by the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
AI developers are thus jockeying for influence, and OpenAI is at something of a disadvantage due to an ongoing legal battle and personal spat with close Trump confidant Elon Musk. The company wields some economic power, however, likely to receive a $40 billion infusion from Softbank in the very near future and having promised to use some of that money to build data centers across the US.
OpenAI’s central pitch is that its package of looser AI regulations would allow it to shave about a year off of its development time for its government-focused services such as the newly-released ChatGPT Gov. It leans on the threat of Chinese competition in the space, particularly the status of its closest rival DeepSeek. The China-based app shot to the top of app store charts by delivering comparable performance and reportedly costs much less than its rivals, but early probing by regulators has already revealed that Hangzhou-based company has little interest in offering data and privacy protections to its users.
OpenAI had previously released an “Economic Blueprint” in January, in anticipation of the then-incoming Trump administration’s change of direction on AI regulations. That proposal noted that about $175 billion in global funds is sitting and earmarked for future AI investment, and that the US must divert the majority of it from China to stay ahead. The plan called for freedom for developers balanced by “clear common-sense standards” and the prevention of the use of government AI tools to create threats to citizens both domestic and international. Some specific moves that it listed were sharing of appropriate national security information with the major AI developers, and the creation of a voluntary pathway for these developers to receive federal protection in model testing and evaluation that would insulate them from whatever laws individual states develop.
The newer AI regulations proposal, submitted directly to the Office of Science and Technology Policy but also released as a public letter, frames the specific key race as the achievement of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and notes China’s intent to overtake the US in this area within the next five years. One particularly interesting element in the proposal is the argument that since China does not respect IP law anyway, there is little point to American AI firms doing so either; OpenAI currently faces multiple copyright violation lawsuits from the Center for Investigative Reporting and the New York Times among others, and has had to hammer out sharing deals with content sources such as the Associated Press and News Corp.
OpenAI seeks federal cover from state laws, copyright enforcement
While the specter of China haunts much of the OpenAI proposal, some of the company’s more immediate concerns are found several pages in. One of the foremost is a set of some 700+ proposed AI bills currently under consideration throughout the 50 states. Another is heading off the equivalent of the EU’s text and data mining opt-outs that can allow content creators to remove an AI’s legal right to access at any time.
It remains to be seen exactly how amenable the Trump administration will be to the AI regulations proposal, but the president and other key members have used similar language before in describing the competition with China as an “arms race.” Trump has also castigated the prior Biden policy on AI as “stifling innovation.” And while Musk and OpenAI do not see eye-to-eye, the administration has nevertheless moved ahead with its “Stargate” long-term AI infrastructure investment project that directly involves Sam Altman’s group among big industry players.
Dr Ilia Kolochenko, CEO at ImmuniWeb, attorney-at-law and a Vice-Chair at the ABA’s Information Security Committee, notes that fighting for copyright exemption may really be a battle for financial survival for AI developers: “Arguably, the most problematic issue with the proposal – legally, practically and socially speaking – is copyright. Paying a truly fair fee to all authors – whose copyrighted content has already been or will be used to train powerful LLM models that are eventually aimed at competing with those authors – will probably be economically unviable, as AI vendors will never make profits. Of note, millions of authors from all around the globe, whose creative content was already misappropriated and exploited to unwarrantedly train for-profit AI models without any permission or even in a direct breach of licensing agreements, still stay without a dime of compensation. In the meantime, some AI giants awkwardly strive to make everybody forget about the inconvenient past and to blindly focus on the allegedly bright future. Advocating for a special regime or copyright exception for AI technologies – which will likely deprive human authors of the true value of fruits of their intellectual labor – will unlikely be even close to fairness. Moreover, the entire discussion towards an exception is a slippery slope that may unleash a parade of horrors: if AI technology deserves some exemptions from copyright protection, why other modern technologies don’t? Lawmakers should take OpenAI’s proposal with a high degree of caution, being mindful of the long-lasting consequences it may have on the American economy and legal system.”
