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America's AI Action Plan

The White House replaces the rescinded 2023 order with a plan to win the race: fewer rules, faster data-centre permits, export of American AI, and 'objective' models in government.

category
policy
significance
2 of 5
people
Donald Trump, David Sacks
organisations
The White House

what had to happen · 56 events back to 1943

Every event this one built on, transitively, in order. The organism has the same path lit. Direct influences are marked.

00 · One neuron · 1

  1. 1943A logical calculus of nervous activity

I · Foundations · 11

  1. 1948A mathematical theory of communication
  2. 1949Cells that fire together wire together
  3. 1950Programming a computer for playing chess
  4. 1950Computing machinery and intelligence
  5. 1958The perceptron learns
  6. 1959Samuel's checkers program coins 'machine learning'
  7. 1960ADALINE and the least-mean-squares rule
  8. 1965Moore's law
  9. 1966ELIZA
  10. 1969Perceptrons
  11. 1970Reverse-mode automatic differentiation

W1 · The first winter · 2

  1. 1974Werbos applies backpropagation to neural networks
  2. 1980The Neocognitron

II · Connection · 3

  1. 1982The Hopfield network
  2. 1985The Boltzmann machine
  3. 1986Backpropagation

W2 · The second winter · 6

  1. 1988Temporal-difference learning
  2. 1989Q-learning
  3. 1989LeNet reads handwritten postcodes
  4. 1990Finding structure in time
  5. 1991The vanishing gradient problem
  6. 1992TD-Gammon reaches world-class backgammon

III · Statistics and data · 9

  1. 1997Long short-term memory
  2. 1998MNIST and LeNet-5
  3. 1999The first GPU
  4. 2003A neural probabilistic language model
  5. 2006Deep belief networks and the word 'deep'
  6. 2007CUDA
  7. 2009Deep learning moves to GPUs
  8. 2009ImageNet
  9. 2010Rectified linear units

IV · Deep learning · 9

  1. 2012Google Brain's network discovers cats
  2. 2012Dropout
  3. 2012AlexNet wins ImageNet
  4. 2013Deep Q-networks play Atari
  5. 2014Superintelligence
  6. 2014Attention
  7. 2014Sequence to sequence learning
  8. 2015Batch normalisation
  9. 2015Residual networks

V · Transformers · 8

  1. 2017The Asilomar AI Principles
  2. 2017Attention is all you need
  3. 2017Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences
  4. 2018GPT: generative pre-training
  5. 2019GPT-2 and the model too dangerous to release
  6. 2020Scaling laws for neural language models
  7. 2020GPT-3
  8. 2020Learning to summarise from human feedback

VI · Everyone · 7

  1. 2022InstructGPT
  2. 2022ChatGPT
  3. 2023GPT-4
  4. 2023'Pause Giant AI Experiments'
  5. 2023The US executive order on AIdirect
  6. 2023The Bletchley Declaration
  7. 2024The EU AI Act enters into forcedirect

The Biden executive order had been revoked on 20 January 2025, the administration's first day, and on 23 July the replacement arrived. "Winning the Race: America's AI Action Plan" listed more than ninety federal actions under three headings, innovation, infrastructure and international leadership, and three executive orders were signed the same day: one to speed permits for data centres and power plants on federal land, one to create a programme for exporting American models, chips and standards as a package, and one requiring that models bought by the government be free of ideological bias, which the order called "woke AI".

The plan kept the export controls on chips to China and the reporting relationships the laboratories had already built with the government's safety institute, renamed the Center for AI Standards and Innovation, and dropped the testing and watermarking requirements of 2023. Its premise was competition with China, and the DeepSeek releases of January were cited throughout.

It is on this timeline beside the EU's Act as the other pole of the policy debate. Within a year the tension inside its own logic, between promoting American models and controlling them, surfaced when the Commerce Department briefly restricted Anthropic's most capable model in June 2026.

what it led to · 3 events downstream, through 2026

Built on it directly:

  1. 2026Claude Fable 5 and the Mythos classVII
  2. 2026The EU delays its high-risk AI rulesVII

And, through them, by era:

VII · Agents · 1
  1. 2026Claude Fable 5.1

sources · 1

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