On January 23, 2025, the President of the United States signed Executive Order 14179, “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence,” to secure America’s leadership in the global AI race and mandate the development of an AI Action Plan. In furtherance to this, the US government issued the “America’s AI Action Plan” setting forth clear policy goals for implementation.
America’s AI Action Plan is structured around three core pillars i.e., innovation, infrastructure, and international diplomacy and security. Below are the key aspects and key policy recommendations covered in the AI Action Plan:
Pillar I: Accelerating AI Innovation
- Maintaining global AI leadership by removing bureaucratic red tape and regulations that hinder innovation, through actions like revising or repealing unnecessary rules, guidance, and agreements that slow AI development.
- Ensuring frontier AI models protect free speech by updating federal procurement guidelines to contract only with large language model (LLM) developers whose systems demonstrate objectivity and neutrality.
- Fostering a supportive environment for open-source and open-weight AI models, making them freely available for global use and modification by developers.
- Driving next-generation AI breakthroughs by publishing a new National AI Research and Development (R&D) Strategic Plan to guide federal research investments.
- Accelerating AI adoption across government and key sectors like healthcare, energy, and agriculture by establishing regulatory sandboxes and AI Centers of Excellence.
- Empowering American workers by integrating AI skill development into career and technical education, workforce training, apprenticeships, and other federally supported programs.
- Supporting next-generation manufacturing of autonomous drones, self-driving cars, and robotics by investing in foundational and translational manufacturing technologies.
- Investing in automated cloud-enabled labs for scientific fields like engineering, materials science, chemistry, biology, and neuroscience, and incentivising researchers to release high-quality public datasets.
- Building world-class scientific datasets by setting minimum data quality standards for biological, materials science, chemical, physical, and other data used in AI model training.
- Investing in AI interpretability and control to enable safe use in defense, national security, and other high-stakes applications.
- Developing an AI evaluations ecosystem by providing guidelines for federal agencies to assess AI systems and advancing the science of AI measurement and evaluation.
- Combating AI-generated deepfakes by developing a formal forensic guideline and voluntary benchmark, and proposing deepfake-related additions to the Federal Rules of Evidence.
Pillar II: Building American AI Infrastructure
- Streamline permitting processes to speed up the construction of data centers, semiconductor manufacturing facilities, and energy infrastructure, while ensuring security by prohibiting adversarial technologies in these projects.
- Upgrade the U.S. electric grid to support the energy demands of AI, by stabilizing current resources, optimizing transmission systems, and prioritizing reliable power sources like nuclear and geothermal energy.
- Restore semiconductor manufacturing to create jobs, secure supply chains, and reduce reliance on foreign countries, focusing on taxpayer-friendly policies and streamlined regulations.
- Build high-security data centers for military and intelligence use, with new technical standards to protect sensitive AI workloads from nation-state threats.
- Train a skilled workforce for AI infrastructure, including electricians and technicians, through national initiatives, apprenticeships, and partnerships with employers and educational institutions.
- Strengthen cybersecurity for critical infrastructure by using AI for defense, establishing an AI Information Sharing and Analysis Centre, and promoting secure-by-design AI systems.
- Prepare for AI incident response by incorporating AI considerations into cybersecurity playbooks and fostering collaboration between government and industry to address AI-specific vulnerabilities.
Pillar III: Leading the International AI Diplomacy and Security
- Exporting American AI technology, including hardware, models, and standards, to allies to meet global demand and prevent reliance on adversarial tech.
- Promoting innovation-friendly policies and U.S. democratic values in global forums such as the UN and G7.
- Strengthening export controls on advanced AI compute and semiconductor manufacturing to deny adversaries access, while enhancing monitoring and enforcement.
- Aligning global allies on technology protection measures, encouraging them to adopt U.S.-style export controls and preventing adversaries from exploiting gaps in the supply chain.
- Evaluating national security risks in frontier AI models, focusing on potential threats like cyberattacks and chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or explosives weapons, in collaboration with industry and research institutions.
- Enhancing biosecurity by requiring robust screening for nucleic acid synthesis tools in federally funded research and fostering international cooperation to prevent malicious use of AI in biology.
Author: Jay Datta, Associate, NovoJuris Legal