What the Trump Administration’s AI Action Plan Means for the Security Industry

On July 23, 2025, the Trump administration officially released “Winning the AI Race: America’s AI Action Plan,” identifying over 90 federal policy actions related to artificial intelligence (AI) across three pillars: Accelerating Innovation, Building American AI Infrastructure and Leading in International Diplomacy and Security. The action plan seeks to enhance the American AI ecosystem by removing red tape and easing regulatory barriers to innovation, invest in semiconductor chip and data center infrastructure projects to support the AI industry and promote American AI standards and systems globally. For the security industry, there are opportunities to offer solutions throughout this ecosystem, from cutting-edge safety and security products available to governments, businesses and consumers, to physical security and cybersecurity protections of data centers and other critical infrastructure.

In a speech later that day, the president also signed three new executive orders to carry out the action plan, “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government”, “Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure” and “Promoting the Export of the American AI Technology Stack.”

Reducing Regulatory Burden and Encouraging Innovation

The first pillar of the action plan focuses on policies to remove onerous regulations and accelerate innovation. As we have seen from the Administration’s support of the proposal for a moratorium on state AI regulations, there is a focus on smoothing over the regulatory environment throughout the U.S. to ensure consistency for businesses. The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is directed to work with federal agencies that have AI-related discretionary funding programs to ensure that they consider a state’s regulatory environment when making funding decisions, and the Federal Communications Commission is recommended to evaluate whether state AI regulations interfere with the agency’s ability to carry out its authorities to regulate interstate communications. On the side of promoting and accelerating technologies, in addition to encouraging open-source and open-weight AI models and launching a coordinated federal effort to enable rapid deployment and testing of AI tools, the administration also recommends educational and labor policies to support AI literacy and skills development in the workforce.

Within the first pillar, there are some additional recommended policy actions relevant to the cutting-edge technologies in the security industry. To support next-generation manufacturing, the U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC) is directed to convene industry and government stakeholders to identify supply chain challenges to American robotics and drone manufacturing. The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Center for AI Standards and Innovation are directed to collaborate with leading AI developers to enable to private sector to actively protect AI innovations from security risks. Cutting-edge security technologies will see a boost in support and investment from the federal government under this initiative.

New Guidelines for Federal Procurement

The first executive order, Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government, sets guidelines for agencies looking to procure large language models (LLMs), requiring that they are “truth-seeking” by prioritizing historical accuracy, scientific inquiry and objectivity when answering user prompts, and they must be “ideologically neutral” meaning that developers cannot encode partisan or ideological judgements into an LLM’s outputs. OMB will give guidance to agencies on how to implement this order in a manner that gives latitude to vendors, allowing them to avoid disclosing sensitive technical data where practicable, and take different approaches to innovation as the agencies account for technical limitations in complying with the order. Vendors that sell to the federal government should be aware of these new guidelines and ensure that their proposals align with the emphasis on ideological neutrality.

Critical Infrastructure Investments

The second executive order, Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Infrastructure, helps to carry out the second pillar of the administration’s action plan, building American AI infrastructure by using federal land and resources for the development of data centers and easing federal regulatory burdens around the buildout of the necessary infrastructure. The order details action for DOC to launch an initiative to provide financial support for data center projects and the U.S. Department of Interior, the U.S. Department of Energy and DOD to identify federal lands to make available, along with modifications to add categorical exclusions and help expedite environmental permitting. Qualifying projects include data centers that require greater than 100 megawatts of new load, infrastructure projects related to data center energy needs, semiconductor facilities, networking equipment or other data center or related infrastructure projects selected by agency heads.

While the data infrastructure executive order focuses mainly on permitting requirements and resource availability for qualifying projects, the administration’s action plan adds some further detail on their security priorities for these plans, recommending policy actions to maintain security guardrails to prohibit adversaries from inserting sensitive inputs to this infrastructure and create new technical standards for high-security AI data centers. The action plan also promotes cybersecurity of critical infrastructure, directing DHS to issue and maintain guidance to private sector entities on remediating and responding to AI-specific vulnerabilities and threats, seeks to ensure collaborative and consolidated sharing of known AI vulnerabilities from within federal agencies to the private sector as appropriate, and directs NIST to partner with the AI and cybersecurity industries to ensure AI is included in the establishment of standards, response frameworks, best practices and technical capabilities of incident response teams, along with promoting resilient AI development and deployment for national security applications within DOD and the intelligence community.

Diplomacy and Trade Policies

The third executive order, Promoting the Export of the American AI Technology Stack, establishes an American AI Exports Program and directs the Economic Diplomacy Action Group to develop and execute a unified strategy to promote the export of American AI technologies and standards. DOC will be issuing a public call for proposals from industry to be included in the AI Exports Program and will require that proposals must include measures to ensure the security and cybersecurity of AI models and systems.

This last order aligns with the third and final pillar of the action plan, which seeks to lead in international AI diplomacy and security. Policy actions recommended by the administration include leveraging the U.S. position in international diplomatic and standards-setting bodies to advocate for AI governance that promotes innovation; developing, implementing and sharing information complementary technology protection measures to mitigate risks from strategic adversaries and concerning entities; developing a technology diplomacy strategic plan to induce key allies to adopt complementary AI protection systems and export controls across the supply chain; evaluating frontier AI systems for national security risks in partnership with frontier AI developers; and evaluating and assessing potential security vulnerabilities and malign foreign influence arising from the use of adversaries’ AI systems in critical infrastructure and elsewhere in the American economy.

While the action plan seeks to remove red tape and onerous regulation, as well as promote innovation internationally, companies should be aware that the plan takes a strong “America First” mentality, seeking to go beyond supportive infrastructure in the United States and strengthen chip export control enforcement and develop new export controls on semiconductor manufacturing subsystems. International supply chains may see further bureaucracy and controls on innovative technologies with the administration’s emphasis on control over American exports and imports in trade policies.