White House science office opens comment period for AI Action Plan

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, working through the interagency Networking and Information Technology Research and Development programme, published a Request for Information seeking public input on the AI Action Plan mandated by Trump’s 23 January executive order rescinding Biden-era AI policy. The notice, filed in the Federal Register on 6 February 2025, asked for submissions on priority actions across a wide list of topics — hardware and chips, data centre buildout, energy supply, open-weight and open-source model development, data privacy and security, technical and safety standards, national security applications, intellectual property, federal procurement, and export controls — and set a public comment deadline of 15 March 2025.

The RFI’s stated goal was to identify “policy actions needed to sustain and enhance America’s AI dominance” while avoiding what the notice called unnecessarily burdensome requirements on private-sector innovation, language that set the tone for the deregulatory direction the eventual Action Plan took. The request drew a large volume of submissions from industry, academia, civil-society groups and state and local governments; OpenAI, Anthropic and Google were among the major labs that filed comments before the deadline.

The RFI itself made no policy decisions — it was a data-gathering step — but it marked the formal start of the process that produced the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan later in 2025, and it is one of the clearest points in the record where the shift from the Biden administration’s risk-focused executive order to a competitiveness-focused one became a documented federal process rather than just rhetoric.