Despite Vice President JD Vance and other “Khanservatives” among Republican ranks offering some praise for how Lina Khan ran the Federal Trade Commission during her time as agency head, her positions are slowly being removed from the agency—both its operating philosophy and it’s blog. According to Wired, at least three posts on AI-related topics on the FTC website authored by Khan’s staff have been removed in recent months.
According to the report, a blog post titled “On Open-Weights Foundation Models,” in which Khan’s team made the case that AI models should be open source with the ability for anyone to publicly review its training weights, was removed sometime in September. Another post, credited to FTC technologists working under Khan, was titled “Consumers Are Voicing Concerns About AI” and tackled multiple potential harms from AI implimentation that could affect consumers. That and a third post, titled “AI and the Risk of Consumer Harm,” were removed sometime in August.
A reasonable assumption might be that the Trump administration simply no longer cares about these matters, or at least doesn’t want its regulatory body to offer anything resembling resistance to tech firms that would like free reign to run their models as they wish. It is a bit odd, though, considering the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan announced earlier this year included a section dedicated to encouraging companies to open-source their models and echoed the Khan-era FTC’s language of “open weights.”
Still, the administration clearly has a more hands-off approach to handling these companies, and Republicans continue to attempt to create loopholes and exemptions that would let AI firms test their models and products without scrutiny of regulatory bodies. Instead of concerns about the implications of the technology and the sector as a whole, the administation seems more interested in picking fights with specific companies, like AI Czar David Sacks’ current crusade against Anthropic.
It’s not the first case of the Trump administration’s FTC wiping out prior positions on AI. In March of this year, it deleted more than 300 posts from its website, most authored during Khan’s leadership, that were critical of big tech firms and AI companies. During that purge, Wired reported that the removal of such posts without any effort to preserve them could be a violation of the Federal Records Act and the Open Government Data Act.
Gizmodo reached out to the FTC for comment, but only received an automated response from an agency spokesperson: “I am out of the office due to the government shutdown. I am unable to respond to your e-mail (or voicemail) until the government is funded, resumes operation, and I return to the office.” A spokesperson for Lina Khan said that she has no comment at this time.
