Trump unveils AI plan to boost U.S. dominance and security

Executive Order 14179, signed on January 23, 2025, revoked earlier Biden-era AI directives and gave the administration 180 days to produce a new strategy.

Released on July 23, 2025, Winning the AI Race: America’s AI Action Plan laid out three pillars: accelerating innovation, building American AI infrastructure and leading in international diplomacy and security. The blueprint included more than 90 federal actions aimed at speeding data centers, semiconductor fabs and allied exports. The plan calls for exporting secure full-stack AI packages to allies, speeding permitting for data centers and semiconductor manufacturing plants, and easing federal rules that slow AI development.

On October 7, 2022, the Biden administration imposed sweeping controls on advanced AI chips and semiconductor technologies, cutting off top U.S. chip designers such as Nvidia and AMD from selling high-end chips for AI and supercomputing to China. Washington tightened and adjusted its approach again in 2025: the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security rescinded the Biden-era AI Diffusion Rule on May 13, 2025 before it fully took effect, while issuing new guidance to reinforce chip export controls.

Beijing moved in parallel. China’s Global AI Governance Action Plan, published on July 26, 2025 at the World AI Conference in Shanghai, called AI an international public good and urged global solidarity, open cooperation and fewer technology barriers. That followed earlier domestic rules, including 2022 algorithm-recommendation requirements and 2023 rules that forced public-facing generative AI services to clear security assessments and register with the government before launch.

In May 2025, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang called U.S. export controls a failure and said they had cut Nvidia’s China market share from 95% to 50%. Nvidia also disclosed that Washington told the company in April 2025 that a license would be required to export its H20 chip to China, and later said H20-related charges hit its results.

OpenAI submitted recommendations for the U.S. AI Action Plan in March 2025, arguing that the United States should prevail over a CCP-backed authoritarian AI model. Anthropic filed its own recommendations that same month and later praised the White House plan’s emphasis on infrastructure, federal adoption, safety testing and security coordination.