Donald Trump

Donald Trump (born 1946) is the 45th and 47th president of the United States. Whatever else divides opinion about his second term, its AI policy has been unambiguous: accelerate. Within days of his January 2025 inauguration he rescinded President Biden’s 2023 AI safety executive order, signed a replacement order on “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence,” and stood beside Sam Altman, Masayoshi Son, and Larry Ellison to announce Stargate — a private venture pledging up to $500 billion for AI data centers in the U.S.

Winning the race

On July 23, 2025, the White House released “Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan,” a 90-plus-point agenda pairing deregulation with fast-track permitting for data centers and chip-export diplomacy. Announcing it at a Washington summit hosted by the Hill and Valley Forum and the All-In podcast, Trump signed three executive orders — on AI infrastructure permitting, American AI exports, and “preventing woke AI” in federal procurement — and framed the race against China in the language of the space race.

Critics span both flanks: safety advocates say the administration dismantled the federal government’s only guardrails on frontier models, while civil-liberties groups object to ideological screening of models bought by the government. States pushed back on attempts to preempt their AI laws. Supporters counter that permitting reform and energy build-out address the actual bottlenecks to American AI leadership — and that the boom in investment since 2025 speaks for itself.