President Trump’s antitrust enforcers are not backing down from legal fights with Big Tech, even as the administration signals a willingness to take a lighter touch with artificial intelligence.
The administration is pressing ahead with two antitrust lawsuits already taken to trial against Google (GGOG, GOOGL) and prepping for new antitrust trials against Meta (META), Amazon (AMZN), and Apple (APPL).
Trump officials at the Federal Trade Commission are also broadening a probe into Microsoft (MSFT) and its relationship with AI upstart OpenAI while challenging Microsoft’s acquisition of gaming giant Activision Blizzard.
“This isn’t the Bush administration,” Trump’s FTC chair Andrew Ferguson told a group of American CEOs on Tuesday in Washington, D.C., referring to one of the weakest US antitrust enforcement periods in modern history.
Andrew Ferguson of the Federal Trade Commission. (Reuters/Sophie Park) ·REUTERS / Reuters
But Trump is also showing he may take a lighter approach to AI as the US competes with China for world supremacy in that ascendant technology.
In a March 7 filing, Trump’s Justice Department argued to a judge that Google should be able to keep its AI investments in companies such as Anthropic even if other parts of its empire are broken up.
“The DOJ action is not just a signal on how the President will treat AI, it is a reaction to, and clear response to, the policy of the president and vice-president,” said JD Harriman, former outside patent counsel for Steve Jobs at Apple and a partner with Foundation Law Group.
Boston College Law professor David Olson agreed that the DOJ’s decision not to interfere with Google’s AI ambitions is evidence of a shift from the Biden era.
“Just from a policy standpoint, I think that it’s telling that they might be walking back [AI remedies], specifically,” Olson said. “Of all of the things they could have walked back, that was the one they decided.”
The tech world is trying to determine how aggressive Trump’s antitrust enforcers will be following four years of a Biden administration marked by legal fights with many of Silicon Valley’s biggest names.
Trump FTC boss Ferguson made it clear in his speech that his agency wouldn’t be backing down. The FTC, he said, would challenge mergers it suspects would harm Americans economically but leave the rest alone.
To that end, the FTC told a judge this week that it was ready to start a trial against Amazon in September.
The FTC also plans to widen its investigation into Microsoft, according to Bloomberg. The probe was first launched by Biden FTC Chair Lina Khan, a key architect of a new movement seeking to expand the legal theories that can give rise to antitrust claims.
Lina Khan, who was chair of the Federal Trade Commission during the Biden administration. (Reuters/Andrew Kelly) ·REUTERS / Reuters
By sustaining many of these cases and probes against Big Tech, Trump has parted ways with traditional Republican-style enforcement, said Peter Salib, a law professor at the University of Houston Law Center.
“It’s very hard to say what’s going on,” Salib added.
Antitrust attorney Mark Wagoner noted following Trump’s win in November, “I am not necessarily convinced that we’re going to go back to what people would call sort of the regular order of Republicans.”
“The new Republican Party is very much a populist party,” he added. “It’s no longer the party of big business.”
Salib said Trump’s motivation for going after companies like Meta (which owns Facebook) and Google is to curb censorship of conservative content.
“The reason they’re treating [tech] this way is so different,” Salib said. Under Biden, “big was bad for all kinds of reasons.”
But it’s clear the administration shares some of the same competition concerns that bothered the Biden administration.
That may come to the fore again next month when FTC is set to face off against social media giant Meta (META) in an antitrust lawsuit brought during Trump’s first term in office.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the inauguration of President Trump on Jan. 20, 2025. (Reuters/Evelyn Hockstein) ·REUTERS / Reuters
Starting April 14, the parties are scheduled to appear for trial in the federal district court for the District of Columbia. The government seeks to unwind Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014.
The government alleges the company leveraged its acquisitions to block rivals from the market for personal social networking services.
This spring, the Justice Department will also be involved in a trial that will determine what happens to Google’s $2 trillion empire. That decision is in the hands of federal Judge Amit Mehta, who ruled last August that Google illegally monopolized online markets for “general search” and “general search text.”
The DOJ has stuck to a Biden-era request for a federal judge to break up Alphabet’s Google, calling for divestment of its Chrome browser.
But in the same request, the DOJ also stood down on the prior administration’s push for Google to sell off its AI investments.
This lighter touch with AI has support from Congress too, according to Harriman, a partner with Foundation Law Group.
In December, he said, a congressional bipartisan task force on AI made it clear in a report that lawmakers would take a “wait and see” attitude on AI regulation.
They expressed concern over China’s AI advancements and the industry’s potential impact on military strength, noting that the country had secured more AI patent applications, journal publications, and journal citations.
“This gives the President a clear path to drop the pressure on Google to divest, without fear of congressional override or even complaint,” Harriman said.
There have been other signs of AI restraint as well. On his first day in office, Trump rescinded an executive order issued by President Biden that directed AI developers to apply AI “responsibly,” including by disclosing their safety test results to the government.
President Trump speaks to reporters at the White House on March 13. (Pool via AP) ·ASSOCIATED PRESS
Trump instead issued an executive order titled “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence,” which emphasized deregulation in the interest of encouraging American dominance.
The order directed federal advisers in technology and national security to “enhance America’s global AI dominance.”
At the Paris AI Summit on Feb. 11, Vice President JD Vance then emphasized AI opportunity over safety concerns.
“I’m not here this morning to talk about AI safety, which was the title of the conference a couple of years ago,” Vance said. “I’m here to talk about AI opportunity.”
“[T]o restrict its development now would not only unfairly benefit incumbents in the space, it would mean paralyzing one of the most promising technologies we have seen in generations.”
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Alexis Keenan is a legal reporter for Yahoo Finance. Follow Alexis on X @alexiskweed.
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