AI Daily: White House unveils AI Action Plan

Catch up on the top artificial intelligence news and commentary by Wall Street analysts on publicly traded companies in the space with this daily recap compiled by The Fly:

AI ACTION PLAN: The Trump administration has unveiled its so-called AI Action Plan, saying the U.S. is “in a race to achieve global dominance in artificial intelligence.” “America’s AI Action Plan has three pillars: innovation, infrastructure, and international diplomacy and security… To maintain global leadership in AI, America’s private sector must be unencumbered by bureaucratic red tape. President Trump has already taken multiple steps toward this goal, including rescinding Biden Executive Order 14110 on AI that foreshadowed an onerous regulatory regime. AI is far too important to smother in bureaucracy at this early stage, whether at the state or Federal level. The Federal government should not allow AI-related Federal funding to be directed toward states with burdensome AI regulations that waste these funds, but should also not interfere with states’ rights to pass prudent laws that are not unduly restrictive to innovation.

“We need to ensure America has leading open models founded on American values. Opensource and open-weight models could become global standards in some areas of business and in academic research worldwide… AI will enable a wide range of new innovations in the physical world: autonomous drones, self driving cars, robotics, and other inventions for which terminology does not yet exist… The Federal government should prioritize investment in these emerging technologies and usher in a new industrial renaissance… AI has the potential to transform both the warfighting and back-office operations of the DOD. The United States must aggressively adopt AI within its Armed Forces if it is to maintain its global military preeminence while also ensuring, as outlined throughout this Action Plan, that its use of AI is secure and reliable. Because the DOD has unique operational needs within the Federal government, it merits specific policy actions to drive AI adoption.

“AI is the first digital service in modern life that challenges America to build vastly greater energy generation than we have today. American energy capacity has stagnated since the 1970s while China has rapidly built out their grid. America’s path to AI dominance depends on changing this troubling trend.”

AI HALLUCINATIONS: Google (GOOGL), Amazon (AMZN), Cohere, and Mistral are intensifying efforts to reduce AI “hallucinations” via technical fixes, data quality improvements, and fact-checking, The Financial Times’ Melissa Heikkila reports. The move to reduce these hallucinations is seen as crucial to increase the use of AI tools across industries such as law and health, which require accurate information, and help boost the AI sector’s revenues, Heikkila writes.

SHANGHAI AI RESEARCH LAB: Amazon is closing its Shanghai AI lab, becoming the most recent U.S. company to pullback from Chinese research efforts, Ryan McMorrow and Zijing Wu of The Financial Times report. A scientist in the Shanghai lab, Wang Minjie, said in a social media post that his team was “being dissolved due to strategic adjustments amid US-China tensions.”

FUNDING: Dario Amodei, the CEO of Amazon-backed Anthropic, told staff that the company plans to seek UAE and Qatar funding, likely enriching “dictators,” and said a “no bad person” rule is impractical, Wired’s Kylie Robison reports. “Unfortunately, I think ‘No bad person should ever benefit from our success’ is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on,” wrote Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in a note to staff obtained by the publication.