The legal pushback that could complicate Trump’s AI plan

The Trump administration’s new “Action Plan” to support US dominance in artificial intelligence is all but certain to be met with legal pushback, especially from civil rights advocates and copyright holders.

President Trump and administration officials spent Wednesday promoting the plan and three accompanying executive orders after repealing much of President Biden’s comparatively protectionist AI policies with a prior executive order in January.

Key pillars of the new Trump plan include accelerating permitting to build the data centers needed to create AI technologies, expanding the export of US-made AI, and freeing foundational AI models of ideological bias.

“From now on, the US government will deal only with AI that pursues truth, fairness, and strict impartiality,” Trump said on Wednesday in remarks from an AI Summit at Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington, D.C.

The plan also seeks to clear away legal headwinds, such as state-specific AI restrictions, and environmental and copyright laws.

Constitutional law scholars say the administration can expect litigation to target his directives that are on less solid legal footing, such as his executive order requiring bias-free algorithms.

That order bans the federal government from procuring AI technology infused with partisan bias and ideological agendas.

The requirement may be impossible to fulfill, the lawyers said. And even if eradicating bias were possible, government discrimination against developers may not hold up under a First Amendment challenge, they added.

“Any executive order that purports to require neutrality among AI doesn’t understand how AI works,” said Stanford University technology law professor Mark Lemley.

He cautioned that if the government were to deny developers from securing government contracts based on viewpoints expressed in their technologies, it could draw constitutional challenges.

Technology lawyer Star Kashman agreed, and added that the concept of unbiased AI is “nice,” but in practice would limit the use of all AI systems in this early stage of development.

“All AI systems carry inherent bias,” Kashman said.

Further complicating the idea, Kashman said, is that the orders seem to penalize companies based on the perceived ideological leanings of their AI systems or their training data sets.

“What would it mean for an AI system to be ‘biased’…and who determines that standard?

AI systems are trained on content across the internet, using data written by humans. Every person has their own bias, which then slips into AI models that process information pulled from the web.