The White House’s America’s AI Action Plan is a 28-page roadmap framed around three pillars: Accelerate AI Innovation, Build American AI Infrastructure, and Lead in International AI Diplomacy and Security.It includes detailed “recommended policy actions” under each. The cover and table of contents are explicit: this is a sprint to “win the AI race,” with innovation, infrastructure and international levers treated as mutually reinforcing.
Pillar I: Innovation at speed, minimal constraints
The plan’s first pillar proposes a government-wide effort to remove red tape and re-open or unwind investigations and consent decrees that “unduly burden AI innovation,” alongside procurement rules that restrict agencies to objective, ideology-neutral frontier models. It also instructs NIST to revise the AI Risk Management Framework to eliminate references to misinformation, DEI and climate, and asks NIST to analyze Chinese frontier models for Communist Party of China (CCP)-aligned censorship. In parallel, it encourages open-source/open-weight development and easier access to compute (including via market mechanisms and the National AI Research Resource (NAIRR) pilot), and calls for regulatory sandboxes and sector-specific standards to speed adoption in healthcare, energy, agriculture and more.
Workforce provisions are overtly pro-adoption: expand AI literacy through schools, apprenticeships and employer-funded training; set up an AI Workforce Research Hub; and rapidly retrain displaced workers. This signals that acceptance that task reconfiguration and displacement will occur but should be managed, not slowed. The science stack emphasizes automated labs, world-class AI-ready datasets (including secure environments for restricted federal data), and foundational research in interpretability, control and robustness, plus a formal evaluations ecosystem.
The Action Plan quietly revives a previously defeated 10‑year federal moratorium on state AI regulation. That requirement would have prevented individual states from enacting any AI-related legislation for a decade (or risk losing access to federal AI development funds and potentially rural broadband funding). Although the original proposal failed in Congress with a nearly unanimous 99–1 Senate defeat, the new plan brings it back, albeit more vaguely, as part of its broader push for a single, nationwide AI policy baseline.
Pillar II: Infrastructure—chips, data centers and power
The second pillar indicates that AI needs vast new energy and physical infrastructure, and the administration intends to streamline permitting for data centers, semiconductor fabs and energy projects, such as relaxed Clean Air/Water Act obligations. Federal lands are to be made available. The grid strategy prioritizes stabilizing current capacity, optimizing existing lines, and adding dispatchable generation (nuclear fission/fusion, enhanced geothermal), paired with market reforms for reliability. The CHIPS office is tasked with keeping grants ROI-focused and stripping “extraneous” policy add-ons, while high-security data centers are envisioned for defense and intelligence workloads with new technical standards. A dedicated skilled-trades pipeline (electricians, Heating & Ventilation staff, etc.) is to be scaled.
Pillar III: International diplomacy, export controls and security
Internationally, the US aims to export a full-stack American AI package (hardware, models, software, applications and standards) to allies willing to join America’s AI alliance. It also wants to counter Chinese influence in multilateral standard-setting and tighten export-control enforcement on compute and semiconductor subsystems, including location-verification of chips and curbs on backfilling by allies. The plan also mandates US-led evaluations of national-security risks in frontier AI-models, biosecurity measures like compulsory sequence-screening for federally funded synthesis users, and secure-by-design AI assurance for critical infrastructure.
What this means for Europe and Flanders
First, regulatory philosophy diverges. The plan explicitly downranks safety guardrails inside NIST guidance and elevates ideological neutrality in public procurement. That competes with the EU AI Act’s emphasis on risk management, documentation, fundamental rights impacts, data governance and environmental disclosures. It can be expected that US diplomacy leans on allies to prefer lighter-touch, evaluation-centric approaches and to adopt US-defined metrics and benchmarks, especially in defense-adjacent applications. Flemish public bodies and universities using US models or infrastructure should anticipate compliance friction: contractual neutrality clauses or content-policy expectations that don’t map cleanly to EU non-discrimination, platform liability and climate-reporting norms.
Second, procurement and standards will be a battleground. If US agencies only buy from vendors meeting a contested objectivity test, those vendors may bake similar requirements into global offerings. In parallel, a US-backed full-stack export model could tie financing and standards together, challenging EU-first procurement choices and complicating interoperability with EU notified-body conformity assessments under the AI Act.
Finally, open-source posture is notable. Washington signals support for open-weight models and easier compute access through NAIRR-adjacent mechanisms. That can benefit EU researchers—provided data-protection and security controls are maintained—and it strengthens the case for EU-US joint evaluations and federated secure data enclaves for sensitive datasets.
With the AI Action Plan now public, the next phase centers on translating its strategic vision into concrete execution. Federal agencies will begin rolling back or revising regulations deemed obstructive, updating frameworks like the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, launching infrastructure initiatives, and accelerating data-center approvals under new executive mandates. Export enforcement and diplomatic outreach will intensify. Three executive orders were immediately signed upon the release of the plan: 1) Accelerating federal permitting for data center infractructure; 2) Promoting the export of the American AI technology stack; 3) Preventing “Woke AI” in federal government procurement.
