Today, Open AI sent their policy proposal to the White House Office of Science and Technology as part of the "US AI Action Plan" process.

It's an interesting document. Here's what we thought was most interesting.

Copyright. The document argues for allowing AI companies to train their models on copyrighted materials under the fair use doctrine. The rationale is interesting: national security. Essentially, their argument goes, China will just pirate this stuff, so if we can't use it as well we'll lose the AI race to China. Self-serving? Yes. Accurate? Also yes.

Export controls. Interestingly, the document proposes changes to the Biden Administration's chip export control rules. While maintaining restrictions on China and aligned countries (Tier III), it would expand "Tier I" status to more countries committed to "democratic AI principles," allowing them greater access to American AI systems and infrastructure.

Infrastructure. That's where things get really interesting—and ambitious. The centerpiece is a proposed "National Transmission Highway Act" which would be comparable in scale and ambition to the 1956 National Interstate and Defense Highways Act. This initiative would dramatically expand transmission capacity, fiber connectivity, and natural gas pipeline construction across the country. OpenAI highlights the current challenges where transmission lines can take 10+ years to complete due to the "three Ps" bottleneck—planning, permitting, and paying for approvals from federal, state, local, and tribal authorities. By streamlining these processes, OpenAI argues that infrastructure projects would be accelerated, maintaining America's global AI competitiveness. The proposal for "AI Economic Zones" would create designated areas with expedited permitting for AI infrastructure including new solar arrays, wind farms, and nuclear reactors. OpenAI suggests creating categorical exclusions to the National Environmental Policy Act, potentially including national security waivers given the global competition for AI leadership. These zones would build upon the "Opportunity Zones" concept from the first Trump Administration, offering tax incentives and credit enhancements to stimulate private capital investment in AI infrastructure. Perhaps most notable is the suggestion to use the Defense Production Act (Title I) to designate critical components for data centers as "rated orders"—including gas turbines, high-voltage transformers, and switchgear. This would prioritize these components in manufacturing schedules, potentially shortening timelines for data center power infrastructure projects significantly. They are basically recommending an all-out effort on AI infrastructure, which is correct.

Policy News You Need To Know

#AI — Speaking of AI, AEI's John Bailey has a good primer on AI co-workers, the most famous of whom was a Google AI "co-scientist" who recently made a significant medical breakthrough.

#Immigration — Trump prevails over Catholic bishops in court battle over refugee money (Washington Times)

#Immigration — Funny, poetic, but also just good policy: thanks to the Trump Administration, immigrants can now use the CBP Home app—the same app that the Biden Administration used to give TPS to millions of aliens— to self-deport.

#TradeWar — The EU tariffed US whisky, so the President is tariffing European wine. Here's Tax Foundation's Erica York on why tit-for-tat trade wars are bad for US exporters.

#Pensions — Interesting bit of history from Dominic Pino at NR, about defined-benefit pensions. "back in the good old days everyone had a defined-benefit pension, but then the greedy capitalists ganged up to exploit the workers under Ronald Reagan and now nobody has one," is the perception, but that's not true, he writes: "the reason for their demise has a lot more to do with the fact that they were bad for workers."

#Life — Interesting piece from EPPC's Alexandra DeSanctis: "In defense of pro-life incrementalism"

#Reg — Interesting (lots of interesting stuff today!) and potentially important warning from ATR: "The 'Corporate Transparency Act' enacted by congress over Trump’s veto in 2020 — and taking effect now — creates a massive database of driver license image scans and passport scans at risk of being leaked and abused by the IRS"