The High Princes of "techno monarchy” gather in DC

Trump issues a decree for the new ‘AI Action Plan.’ What those of us who live outside the palace walls need to worry about, particularly the impact on a free press.

President Donald Trump speaks during an AI summit at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium, Wednesday, July 23, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)

If the vision of the philosophers in the palace of Trump is to create a “techno monarchy,” as they like to call it, then this week’s AI summit in Washington was really the first gathering of the high princes of AI to celebrate the first royal decree.

With the song God Bless the USA ringing out over loud speakers, President Trump took center stage and made his pronouncement: “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.”

Arrayed before him were tech leaders, venture capitalists and billionaires, including Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang and Palantir’s chief technology officer Shyam Sankar. The gathering was co-hosted by The Hill and Valley Forum, an influential lobbying group for the tech industry, and the Silicon Valley All-in Podcast, which is hosted by White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks.

As part of the event, The White House announced the release of a document titled “Winning the AI Race: America’s AI Action Plan.”

The intention of this new ‘Action Plan’ could not have been more clear: The regulatory framework put in place to offer guardrails to tech, a set of boundaries that once guided federal lawmakers, shall be no longer. To most who are trying to follow the quantum change that AI will inevitably bring and who believe in its transformative power for good, this is potentially a historic moment.

The Plan identifies over 90 Federal policy actions across three pillars – Accelerating Innovation, Building American AI Infrastructure, and Leading in International Diplomacy and Security. These actions by the Trump Administration are set to be rolling out in the coming weeks and months. Some of the highlights reported by CBS this week include:

• Support the buildout of data centers, semiconductor fabrication plants and the nation's electric grid

• Create rules for government contractors in an attempt to eliminate "ideological bias" in chatbots

• Withhold funding from states that have "burdensome" AI regulations

• Compel federal agencies to review their rules and repeal any that obstruct AI development

• Establish a program to deliver AI export packages — including hardware, large language models, software, applications and standards — to U.S. allies.

These central tenets of the AI Action Plan are laced with patriotism and a nationalist fervor that is increasingly pronounced in the tech sector. Trump told the group, “Winning the AI race will demand a new spirit of patriotism and national loyalty in Silicon Valley – and long beyond Silicon Valley.”

This brand of nationalism contours closely to the politics of the Trump administration and one executive order targets what the White House calls “woke” AI. It mandates any company receiving federal funding to maintain AI models free from “ideological dogmas such as DEI.”

Most of the other parts of the executive order focus on stripping away regulation and creating favorable conditions for the export of “American AI” to other countries. Another part eases environmental rules and expedites federal permitting for data centers, which suck up huge amounts of energy.

Most of us can join in the hope that this new climate allows for all this creativity and innovation as this is, of course, much needed for new business models to succeed and for America to win what is shaping up to be a technology arms race that will make the nuclear arms race of the Cold War look quaint. But I also hope we have learned the lessons of the last quantum shift in the digital realm where we saw the potential for destructive, divisive and dangerous trends emerge from platforms when they are not properly regulated toward the public good.

Look at what Google and Facebook and the platforms they created did to undercut traditional journalism and look at how it left our country more polarized than ever through algorithms that purposefully drove that polarization in order to maximize audience and therefore maximize profit. Last time, journalists and a wider community that believe in the importance of discernible facts to drive any conversation locally, nationally or globally, were not at the table when key decisions were made about the future of what the internet would look like. This time around, we need to make sure we are at the table and make sure we serve as some form of counterweight to AI’s technology platforms that stand to profit enormously from an unfettered landscape where they are free to reign.

This new AI landscape has been achieved through a charm offensive and a steady stream of donations by tech companies who have sought to curry favor with Trump. As The Guardian pointed out in its coverage, the CEOs of Alphabet, Meta, Amazon and Apple all 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 Guardian quoted a new report from the nonprofit Issue One, which revealed that the tech industry spent $36 million in corporate donations: reported that “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.

This gathering lands in the aftermath of the U.S. Senate’s approval of Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill.” And buried within the coverage of that considerable legislative victory for Trump was the striking from the bill one provision that had the full attention of the tech sector. That was the provision known as (sec. 43201(c)) which would have imposed a 10-year bar on state and local governments enforcing “any law or regulation” concerning artificial intelligence (AI). This provision, had it been kept in, essentially would have given big tech and AI platforms carte blanche to control how AI will shape our lives.

The way I read this provision in my column last month was that it resembled a latter day Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which provided a legal shield for online platforms from liability for content posted by their users. Essentially, it means that companies like Meta, Alphabet and X Corp aren't held responsible for the content posted by their users on Facebook, YouTube and X (formerly Twitter.) It effectively allowed them to take the content from news organizations, for example, that work hard to publish facts and use them in their algorithms without much of any consequence.

As I wrote last month, critics view Section 230 as the original sin of the Internet which allowed misinformation and disinformation to soak into the landscape of news across America, contributing to the financial crisis of local newspapers like the MV Times, where I serve as publisher, and the scores of other local newspapers that GroundTruth supported through Report for America. The real impact of Section 230 was to create a new media landscape in which two digital entities, Google and Facebook, controlled more than two-thirds of all digital advertising and that has everything to do with how newspapers fell into their steep decline.

So as we watch this new AI Action Plan take place we have to see it light of a second effort by the tech sector to get what it wanted, and Trump is doing so not through his legislative initiative but through an executive order. That means we all have to question what will happen to a free press in the coming age of unregulated AI?

Will the AI Action Plan in effect offer carte blanche for tech companies to do as they will and continue to scrape content without compensating those who created it? That, like Section 230, will likely weaken news organizations, empower AI platforms, and leave us all heading down a road that will continue to allow tech to profit from journalism, while eroding even further its business models.

The irony of it all is that AI runs the risk of destroying the very enterprise – a trusted, independent press – that the LLMs will need to verify the content, and the data that AI companies use to train the models that provide us with answers when we use an AI platform, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity or any other. If users can’t trust the answers they get from a service, they’ll ultimately abandon it.

AI platforms should care about that. If they haven’t yet realized it they should ponder this equation and understand that journalism, particularly local journalism, is all we have to unearth the inner-workings of local governments around the country. It is an essential activity in chronicling life in the small towns and rural counties that make up a huge swath of America. To put it more succinctly, if local journalism did not exist, the AI platforms would have to invent it.

What I mean by that is they should be working with local news organizations to verify the content they create, which will in turn ensure the accuracy of the data – also known as facts – that they use to feed the LLMs. It will be a lot more difficult to invent local nodes of verification of facts than it would be to support, and compensate fairly, those who are already doing it, such as local news organizations. And as a win-win, using these local newsrooms for this task could help to save them from the death spiral they are in.

For those of us who live outside the walls of the palace, we will have to keep challenging these high princes of the “techno monarchy” and keep encouraging it to usher in a new Enlightenment, one where truth is the new currency of the realm. I’m not holding my breath, but it is an idea worth hoping for and working towards.