The AI Action Plan: What Big Tech Wants—and What Everyone Else Is Afraid Of
Why the future of American AI isn’t just about regulation vs. innovation—but who gets to shape the rules in the first place.
The U.S. government’s AI Action Plan is shaping up to be a battlefield—not just between industry and regulators, but among wildly different visions of the future.
Over 500 entities—from the usual Big Tech suspects to scrappy startups, creative unions, defense technologists, and existential risk watchdogs—submitted comments. The result is a fascinating window into the power dynamics, economic stakes, and ethical minefields of the AI era.
Let’s cut through the noise and look at what each camp is really saying.
1. Everyone Wants Clarity—But for Very Different Reasons
There’s rare consensus on at least one point: America needs coherent national AI rules.
But scratch the surface, and the motivations diverge sharply.
• Google and OpenAI call for federal preemption to avoid a “patchwork” of state laws. Their real concern? Being tied down by 50 different sets of compliance rules while racing to build trillion-dollar platforms.
• Startups (like those backed by a16z) want regulation too—but mainly to stop incumbents from pulling the ladder up behind them. They argue that too much red tape will crush “Little Tech” before it can scale.
• Creative industry coalitions (400+ writers, actors, publishers) demand national guardrails for a very different reason: to keep their work from being scraped, cloned, and monetized without consent—or compensation.
Everyone wants rules. But some want speed. Others want survival.
2. The Copyright Fight: Silicon Valley vs. Hollywood
One of the most explosive flashpoints? Training data.
• OpenAI and other foundation model developers argue for loosening copyright protections—essentially legalizing mass scraping of books, images, and audio as “fair use” for model training.
• The creative community, by contrast, sees this as theft at scale. Their demand: make AI pay for content just like everyone else.
This isn’t just a legal fight. It’s a culture war.
Tech sees content as data. Creators see it as labor.
And this time, they’re organized.
3. Defense AI: The Forgotten Front
While Big Tech treads carefully on national security (burned by Project Maven backlash), defense startups like Shield AI are charging ahead.
Their vision? A military force transformed by autonomous systems—cheap, fast, and unmanned.
They’re lobbying hard for public investment in what they call a “hybrid force structure,” combining humans and swarms of intelligent drones.
Here’s the twist: the most aggressive AI military lobbying isn’t coming from generals or Big Tech.
It’s coming from venture-backed startups.
4. Ethics, Existential Risk, and the Push for Oversight
Nonprofits like the Future of Life Institute take a more apocalyptic tone:
• Pause self-improving AI.
• Ban self-replicating agents.
• Establish strict oversight before it’s too late.
Meanwhile, cognitive scientists like Gary Marcus want something more institutional:
An FDA-for-AI that evaluates risk before models are deployed at scale.
Big Tech? Mostly silent on existential threats. Or at least very careful not to invite too much oversight too soon.
One thing is clear:
The louder the call for hard regulation, the smaller the megaphone.
5. Power, Not Just Policy
This debate isn’t just about how to regulate AI.
It’s about who gets to shape the AI economy—and on what terms.
• Big Tech wants room to run.
• Startups want a fair race.
• Creators want compensation.
• Nonprofits want safety.
• Defense startups want dominance.
• Citizens want answers.
The question for policymakers isn’t just how much to regulate, but who they’re listening to when they write the rules.
Bottom Line:
AI governance isn’t just a technical challenge.
It’s a political one.
And right now, the most important contest is over the microphone.