In late July 2024, Lina Khan, then the chair of the US Federal Trade Commission, gave a speech at an event hosted by the San Francisco startup accelerator Y Combinator in which she positioned herself as an advocate for open source artificial intelligence.
The event took place as California lawmakers were considering a landmark bill called SB 1047 that would have imposed new testing and safety requirements on AI companies. Critics of the legislation, which was later vetoed by California governor Gavin Newsom, argued it would hamper the development and release of open source AI models. Khan called for a less restrictive approach and said that, with open models available to them, โsmaller players can bring their ideas to market.โ
In the days leading up to the event, Khanโs staff published a blog on the agencyโs website emphasizing similar talking points. The piece noted that โopen sourceโ had been used to describe AI models with a variety of different characteristics. The authors instead suggested adopting the term โopen-weight,โ meaning a model that has its training weights released publicly, allowing anyone to inspect, modify, or reuse it.
The Trump administration has since removed that blog post, two sources familiar with the matter tell WIRED. The Internet Archiveโs Wayback Machine shows that the July 10, 2024, FTC blog titled โOn Open-Weights Foundation Modelsโ was redirected on September 1 of this year to a landing page for the FTCโs Office of Technology.
Another post from October 2023 titled โConsumers Are Voicing Concerns About AI,โ authored by two FTC technologists, now similarly redirects back to the agencyโs Office of Technology landing page. According to the Wayback Machine, the redirect occurred in late August of this year.
A third FTC post about AI that was authored by Khanโs staff and published on January 3, 2025, titled โAI and the Risk of Consumer Harm,โ now leads to an error screen that says โPage not found.โ According to the Wayback Machine, that blog post was still live on the FTCโs website as of August 12, but by August 15 it had been removed from the internet. In the original post, Khanโs staff had written that the agency was โincreasingly taking note of AIโs potential for real-world instances of harmโfrom incentivizing commercial surveillance to enabling fraud and impersonation to perpetuating illegal discrimination.โ
Itโs not clear why the blog posts were removed from the internet. An FTC spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. Khan, through a spokesperson, declined to comment.
