Tech Industry Largely Cheers Trump Hands Off Approach to AI

WASHINGTON, Feb. 12, 2025 – As the Trump administration pushed forward with an all-unshackled approach to artificial intelligence, some in the tech industry – speaking at the State of the Net event here Tuesday – applauded.

“Vance made it very clear [this morning] how the Trump administration is going to approach [AI regulation],” said Miranda Nazzaro, technology reporter for The Hill, during a panel discussion. “We saw Trump’s executive order, as well as the repeal of a lot of the Biden policies, which Trump believes were hindering AI development.”

The Tuesday discussion came on the day Vice President J.D. Vance pressed the issue of AI regulation at the Paris AI Summit, where he rejected global AI regulation and vowed not to sign a pledge to promote responsible AI development that was signed by more than 60 other nations.

Trump’s Jan. 23 executive order on AI directed federal agencies to remove barriers to AI innovation and called for the creation of an AI action plan within 180 days. The order said that AI must be “free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas” — a criticism of Biden’s 2023 executive order, which sought to impose stricter oversight on advanced AI models.

During the discussion on Tuesday, technology experts and policy advocates grappled with the implications of Trump’s deregulatory approach to artificial intelligence. While it might supercharge AI development, it could also entrench the power of industry giants.

John Mitchell, senior manager of governmental affairs at the Consumer Technology Association, welcomed the administration’s pivot and called it a “fundamental shift in U.S. AI policy” that offered relief to small and mid-sized AI companies that have struggled with regulatory uncertainty.

Mitchell pointed to the challenges that he said “Little Tech” faced in navigating potential state-level AI laws and compliance burdens that favor industry giants with vast legal resources. “You have to regulate the use cases, not the technology itself. The moment we start regulating AI models and not their real-world impact, we’re going to be chasing ghosts,” he said.

But that same approach could cement the dominance of the largest AI firms at the expense of smaller players, warned Richard Witt, president of the Glia Net Alliance and former policy counsel at Google and Mozilla.

“My one concern is that this essentially hands the keys over to the largest companies who are, in fact, the largest AI, LLM model makers,” he said.

AI legislation in the states is also picking up. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a landmark bill aimed at establishing first-in-the-nation safety measures for large artificial intelligence models in September.

Among the other AI measures discussed by panelists included:

• The Creative AI Act, a bill from Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., which would provide free or low-cost access to datasets and computing resources for development of AI workflows, unleashing American innovation;
• A bipartisan push to codify the U.S. AI Safety Institute, setting government-backed AI standards; and, 
• the Artificial Intelligence Research, Innovation, and Accountability Act, a bill from Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., focusing on regulating high-risk AI applications in finance and healthcare.