Trump highlights need for federal law on how AI models train

U.S. President Donald Trump highlighted the need for developers of artificial intelligence models to operate under a common rule regarding the training of those models.

“You can’t be expected to have successful AI models where you have to make a deal with every content provider to train your models,” he said during the Winning the AI Race summit in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday evening.

Trump was referring to the growing list of lawsuits between AI companies and publishers. For example, Microsoft-backed (NASDAQ:MSFT) OpenAI faces a copyright infringement suit by The New York Times (NYSE:NYT). The lawsuit alleges that Microsoft and OpenAI illegally used the newspaper’s content to train AI models.

“Of course you can’t copy or plagiarize an article or book, but you can learn from it,” he added. “These rules can’t vary from state to state. You need to have a federal rule in place. We need one common sense federal standard that supersedes all the states.”

The comments were made moments before Trump signed the AI Action Plan. The plan features three pillars: innovation, infrastructure, and international diplomacy and security; and it outlines a path for the U.S. to dominate the AI race.

“Winning this competition will test our capacities more than anything since the space race,” Trump said. “This groundbreaking technology will determine so much about the future of this world. America is the country that started the AI race, and I’m here to declare that America is going to work hard, and we’re going to win it.”

“It will require us to blast through obstacles and rebuild the industrial bedrock of our country,” he added. “Winning the AI race will require a new spirit of patriotism in Silicon Valley and beyond … We need new data centers, chip manufacturing facilities and new energy production … It’s time to reclaim our heritage as a nation of builders.”

He also said he intends to dismantle regulations that are burdening the tech sector.

“You are a regulation-prone group, and we are trying to get those out of the way so you can use your genius,” Trump said to an audience that included tech executives such as Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang and AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) CEO Lisa Su.

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