Save StorySave this storySave StorySave this story<\/p>\n
In late July 2024, Lina Khan, then the chair of the US Federal Trade Commission, gave a speech at an event hosted by the San Francisco startup accelerator Y Combinator in which she positioned herself as an advocate for open source artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n
The event took place as California lawmakers were considering a landmark bill called SB 1047 that would have imposed new testing and safety requirements on AI companies. Critics of the legislation, which was later vetoed by California governor Gavin Newsom, argued it would hamper the development and release of open source AI models. Khan called for a less restrictive approach and said that, with open models available to them, \u201csmaller players can bring their ideas to market.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the days leading up to the event, Khan\u2019s staff published a blog on the agency\u2019s website emphasizing similar talking points. The piece noted that \u201copen source\u201d had been used to describe AI models with a variety of different characteristics. The authors instead suggested adopting the term \u201copen-weight,\u201d meaning a model that has its training weights released publicly, allowing anyone to inspect, modify, or reuse it.<\/p>\n
The Trump administration has since removed that blog post, two sources familiar with the matter tell WIRED. The Internet Archive\u2019s Wayback Machine shows that the July 10, 2024, FTC blog titled \u201cOn Open-Weights Foundation Models\u201d was redirected on September 1 of this year to a landing page for the FTC\u2019s Office of Technology.<\/p>\n
Another post from October 2023 titled \u201cConsumers Are Voicing Concerns About AI,\u201d authored by two FTC technologists, now similarly redirects back to the agency\u2019s Office of Technology landing page. According to the Wayback Machine, the redirect occurred in late August of this year.<\/p>\n
A third FTC post about AI that was authored by Khan\u2019s staff and published on January 3, 2025, titled \u201cAI and the Risk of Consumer Harm,\u201d now leads to an error screen that says \u201cPage not found.\u201d According to the Wayback Machine, that blog post was still live on the FTC\u2019s website as of August 12, but by August 15 it had been removed from the internet. In the original post, Khan\u2019s staff had written that the agency was \u201cincreasingly taking note of AI\u2019s potential for real-world instances of harm\u2014from incentivizing commercial surveillance to enabling fraud and impersonation to perpetuating illegal discrimination.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not clear why the blog posts were removed from the internet. An FTC spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. Khan, through a spokesperson, declined to comment.<\/p>\n
Former FTC public affairs director Douglas Farrar tells WIRED he was especially surprised that the open weights blog was removed, given the agency\u2019s role as a key AI market regulator. \u201cI was shocked to see the Ferguson FTC be so out of line with the Trump White House on this signal to the market,\u201d he says, referring to newly appointed FTC chair Andrew Ferguson.<\/p>\n
The Trump administration\u2019s AI Action Plan from July argues that \u201cwe need to ensure America has leading open models founded on American values\u201d and \u201cthe Federal government should create a supportive environment for open models.\u201d (The FTC did not respond to questions about whether these deletions represent a shift in policy.)<\/p>\n
Several advisers working for the Trump administration on technology issues, including David Sacks, special adviser to the White House on AI and crypto, and Sriram Krishnan, a senior policy adviser to the White House on AI, have also advocated for open source AI, framing it as a critical means for the US to maintain its technological dominance.<\/p>\n
Since President Trump returned to the White House in January, the FTC has removed hundreds of blogs and business guidance for the tech industry published during Khan\u2019s tenure, WIRED previously reported.<\/p>\n
In March, the FTC removed some 300 posts related to AI, consumer protection, and the agency\u2019s lawsuits against tech giants like Amazon and Microsoft. One post titled \u201cThe Luring Test: AI and the engineering of consumer trust\u201d offered guidance to tech companies about how to avoid building deceptive AI chatbots. The blog post had won an award from the Aspen Institute in 2023 for its accessible descriptions of artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n
An FTC source told WIRED in March that removing public blog posts \u201craises serious compliance concerns under the Federal Records Act and the Open Government Data Act,\u201d which require government agencies to preserve records that have administrative, legal, or historical value and make them accessible to the public. During the Biden administration, FTC leadership placed \u201cwarning\u201d labels on business directives and other guidance published during previous administrations that it disagreed with.<\/p>\n
More than 200 posts and statements authored by Khan herself were still available on the FTC\u2019s website at the time of publication. This includes a September 2024 blog on enforcement actions the agency took against allegedly deceptive AI schemes, a 2024 joint statement from the FTC and other groups on competition in the market for generative AI foundation models, and remarks from a 2023 roundtable on generative AI, in which Khan said the agency was \u201clooking closely at how AI can turbocharge fraud\u201d and \u201centrench the dominance of the firms that control necessary raw inputs,\u201d among other harms.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Save StorySave this storySave StorySave this story In late July 2024, Lina Khan, then the chair of the US Federal Trade Commission, gave a speech at an event hosted by the San Francisco startup accelerator Y Combinator in which she positioned herself as an advocate for open source artificial intelligence. The event took place as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35858,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-35857","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35857"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35857\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35858"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}