The U.S. AI Action Plan: Build for Speed, but Prepare for Scrutiny

On January 23, 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order 14179 titled Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence. It marked a formal break from the Biden-era emphasis on governance-first development. The order rescinded multiple prior directives seen as overly cautious and set a 180-day clock for a new national AI strategy. This culminated in the July 23 release of Winning the AI Race: America’s AI Action Plan, a 90-action point blueprint built on speed, scale, and strategic posture over regulatory constraint. The policy architecture revolves around three pillars: 

1. Accelerating AI Innovation: The plan frames regulatory constraints as obstacles to overcome, and largely eliminates or revises rules that “unduly burden AI innovation.” It emphasizes open-source and open-weight models, expands the government’s role as a customer, and encourages the use of sandboxes so AI can be tested in live environments before formal regulation kicks in.
2. Building American AI Infrastructure: Infrastructure is treated as national strategy. That means speeding up chip fabrication, expanding data center capacity, modernizing the energy grid, and growing a skilled workforce to keep scaled AI systems running reliably.
3. Leading in International Diplomacy and Security: AI leadership abroad is framed as a matter of control over exports and alliances. The U.S. aims to limit adversary access, deepen coordination with allies, and embed American-built AI systems into global defense and intelligence networks to promote models that reflect U.S. ideology. 

The plan positions the U.S. government not as a regulator of last resort, but as an enabler of first-mover advantage. It clears the runway for private-sector AI, removes procedural drag, and pours investment into the infrastructure required to scale quickly. Unlike the prior administration’s risk-aware posture, this framework is unapologetically race-forward: accelerate first, govern later, and keep U.S. models at the center of the global stack.

From Guardrails to Greenlights: A Strategic Reversal

Where the Biden administration prioritized fairness, accountability, and transparency, the Trump plan treats those principles as secondary. Under Trump, these concepts are reframed into context but they are no longer driving the agenda. For example, his administration retained language around rights and safeguards, but the center of gravity shifted. Instead, the AI Action Plan prioritizes speed of deployment, market capture, and competitive positioning over fully codifying broad ethical frameworks. 

This is a calculated trade-off: move quickly enough to secure economic and geopolitical advantage, then adapt governance over time. This is not an oversight or a failure to regulate. It is a strategic choice to delay structure in the name of scale. The underlying premise is that AI is inevitable and the first to deploy will define the playing field. That may prove strategically effective. It may also prove structurally fragile.

Three Core Shifts To Watch 

1. Guarded Openness: U.S. policy now leans toward permissiveness, with most guardrails introduced only after deployment. Export controls and coordination with allies shape the boundaries abroad, but inside the domestic market, momentum is the driving force.
2. Safety Through Deployment: Instead of locking in hard standards upfront, the government is signaling that progress matters more than perfection. Companies are expected to launch quickly, monitor closely, and patch issues as they go. If it fails in public, the assumption is that it can be fixed in public.
3. Infrastructure as Strategy: What used to be considered backend logistics like chip manufacturing, grid resilience, and data center approvals is now central to AI competitiveness. Real power lies not just in model quality or scale, but in who controls the physical and operational systems that support it.

What This Means for Your Boardroom

This framework puts boards in a bind: the incentives now favor speed, but the liabilities will come later. If your company is building or deploying AI, here is what should be on the board agenda:

• Current Use and Governance: What AI systems are we running and what is our governance architecture for them?
• Regulatory Readiness: Does our AI policy reflect current requirements and prepare us for rapid changes?
• Transparency and Accountability: How are we testing AI in realistic and high-stress conditions in private before it fails in public?
• Crisis Preparedness: Do we have a day-zero plan to take a system offline, communicate clearly, and restore both service and consumer confidence?
• Policy and Competitive Intelligence: Who is monitoring policy, export controls, and competitor moves so we can pivot quickly?

The Strategic Balancing Act

The current deregulatory tone will not be permanent. It is a phase shift. Accountability always arrives, whether through litigation, reputational erosion, or policy correction. The opportunity right now is massive for companies that can move fast and self-govern effectively. Speed alone is not a strategy. The real edge comes from balancing this policy-driven push for acceleration with the discipline to build infrastructure, trust, and resilience in parallel.

The companies that win long-term will be those that embed governance from the outset as a strategic capacity rather than as a crisis response. The question is not whether you move. It is whether your systems are built to survive what comes after the sprint.

AI Moves Fast. Make Sure You’re Moving in the Right Direction.

The U.S. AI Action Plan rewards speed but only the companies that pair acceleration with strategic governance will win long-term. Talk to our AI optimization experts to ensure your systems are visible, trusted, and built to outlast the sprint.