Donald Trump’s AI summit in Washington this week was a fanfare-filled event catered to the tech elite. The president took the stage on Wednesday evening, as the song God Bless the USA piped over the loudspeakers, and then he decreed: “America must once again be a country where innovators are rewarded with a green light, not strangled with red tape, so they can’t move, so they can’t breathe.”
The message was clear – the tech regulatory environment that was once the focus of federal lawmakers is no longer.
“I’ve been watching for many years,” Trump continued. “I’ve watched regulation. I’ve been a victim of regulation.”
As Trump spoke to the crowd, he addressed them as “the group of smart ones … the brain power”. In front of him were tech leaders, venture capitalists and billionaires, including Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang and Palantir’s chief technology officer Shyam Sankar. The Hill and Valley Forum, an influential tech industry interest group, co-hosted the confab, along with the Silicon Valley All-in Podcast, which is hosted by White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks.
Dubbed “Winning the AI Race”, the forum was an opportunity for the president to deliver what he called the “AI action plan”, which aims to loosen restrictions on the development and deployment of artificial intelligence.
The cornerstone of that plan are three executive orders that Trump said will turn the US into an “AI export powerhouse” and roll back some of the rules put in place by the Biden administration, which included guardrails around safe and secure AI development.
“Winning the AI race will demand a new spirit of patriotism and national loyalty in Silicon Valley – and long beyond Silicon Valley,” Trump said.
One executive order targets what the White House calls “woke” AI and requires any company receiving federal funding to maintain AI models free from “ideological dogmas such as DEI”. But the other two focus on deregulation, a major demand of American tech leaders who have taken an increasingly bullish stand on government oversight.
One of those promotes the export of “American AI” to other countries and the other eases environmental rules and expedites federal permitting for power-hungry data centers.
Millions in lobbying
To get to this moment, tech companies have been forging a friendly relationship with Trump. The CEOs of Alphabet, Meta, Amazon and Apple donated to the president’s inauguration fund and met with him at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, has become a close ally of Trump, and Nvidia’s Huang has also cozied up with the president with promises of investing $500bn in AI infrastructure in the US over the next four years.
“The reality is that big tech companies are still spending tens of millions of dollars to curry favor with lawmakers and shape tech legislation,” said Alix Fraser, the vice-president of advocacy for the nonprofit Issue One.
In a report released on Tuesday, Issue One looked at lobbying spending in 2025 and found that the tech industry has spent record-breaking sums. Eight of the largest tech companies spent a combined $36m – that’s an average of about $320,000 per day when Congress is in session, according to Issue One.
Meta spent the most, $13.8m, and has hired 86 lobbyists this year, according to the report. And Nvidia and OpenAI saw the biggest increases, with Nvidia spending 388% more than the same time last year, and OpenAI spending 44% more.
In the lead-up to Trump’s unveiling of his AI plan, more than 100 prominent labor, environmental, civil rights and academic groups countered the president and signed a “People’s AI action plan”. In a statement, the groups stressed the need for “relief from the tech monopolies” that they say “sacrifice the interests of everyday people for their own profits”.
“We can’t let big tech and big oil lobbyists write the rules for AI and our economy at the expense of our freedom and equality, workers and families’ wellbeing, even the air we breathe and the water we drink – all of which are affected by the unrestrained and unaccountable rollout of AI,” the groups wrote.
Meanwhile, tech companies and industry groups celebrated the executive orders. Microsoft, IBM, Dell, Meta, Palantir, Nvidia, Anthropic, xAI and others praised the plan. James Czerniawski, the head of emerging technology policy at the Consumer Choice Center, a pro-business lobbying group, heralded Trump’s AI plan as a “bold vision”.
“This is a world of difference from the hostile regulatory approach of the Biden administration,” Czerniawski concluded.
