At the end of July In 2024, Lina Khan, then chair of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, gave a speech at an event organized by the San Francisco startup accelerator Y Combinator, in which she introduced herself as a supporter of open source artificial intelligence.
The event came as California lawmakers were considering a landmark bill called SB 1047, which would impose fresh testing and security requirements on artificial intelligence companies. Critics of the bill, which was later vetoed by California Governor Gavin Newsom, argued that it would make it more tough to develop and release open-source artificial intelligence models. Khan called for a less restrictive approach and said that with open models available, “smaller players can bring their ideas to market.”
Days before the event, Khan’s staff posted a blog on the agency’s website highlighting similar topics. The article noted that “open source” was used to describe AI models with different characteristics. Instead, the authors suggested adopting the term “open weight,” meaning a model in which training weights are made publicly available so anyone can check, modify, or reuse them.
The Trump administration has since deleted the blog post, two sources familiar with the matter tell WIRED. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine shows that a July 10, 2024 FTC blog titled “On Open Weight Base Models” has been redirected On September 1 of this year to the FTC Technology Bureau landing page.
Another post from October 2023 titled “Consumers express concerns about artificial intelligence,” authored by two FTC technologists, now similarly redirects back to the agency’s Office of Technology landing page. According to the Wayback Machine, you have been redirected at the end of August this year.
A third FTC post on artificial intelligence authored by Khan’s staff and published on January 3, 2025, titled “Artificial Intelligence and the Risk of Consumer Harm,” now leads to an error screen stating “Page Not Found.” According to the Wayback Machine, this blog post was still on the FTC’s website on August 12, but it was removed from the Internet on August 15. In the original post, Khan’s staff wrote that the agency is “increasingly alert to AI’s potential to cause real-world harm — from encouraging commercial surveillance, to enabling fraud and impersonation, to perpetuating illegal discrimination.”
It is unclear why the blog posts were removed from the Internet. An FTC spokesman did not respond to a request for comment. Khan, through a spokesman, declined to comment.