Several blog posts that had appeared on the Federal Trade Commission’s website and addressed open source software and possible consumer risks from the spread of commercial AI tools have been removed in recent months, raising questions about the agency’s public record on the technology.
In late July 2024, Lina Khan, then the chair of the US Federal Trade Commission, spoke at an event hosted by the San Francisco startup accelerator Y Combinator and cast herself as an advocate for open source artificial intelligence. The appearance came as California lawmakers were debating SB 1047, a bill that would have imposed new testing and safety requirements on AI companies. Critics said the measure would hinder the release of open source AI models; Khan argued for a less restrictive stance and said that, with open models available to them, “smaller players can bring their ideas to market.”
Days before that event, staffers in Khan’s office posted a blog to the agency website that made similar points. The piece argued that the label “open source” had been applied to a wide range of model types and proposed using the term “open-weight,” meaning a model that has its training weights released publicly, allowing anyone to inspect, modify, or reuse it.
Two people familiar with the situation say the Trump administration has since taken that post down. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine shows the July 10, 2024, FTC blog titled “On Open-Weights Foundation Models” was redirected on September 1 to a landing page for the FTC’s Office of Technology.
A separate post from October 2023, titled “Consumers Are Voicing Concerns About AI” and written by two FTC technologists, now sends visitors to the same Office of Technology landing page; the Wayback Machine indicates that redirect appeared in late August. A third piece, authored by Khan staff and published on January 3, 2025, called “AI and the Risk of Consumer Harm,” returns an error page that reads “Page not found.” The Wayback Machine shows that post was live on August 12 but removed by August 15. In the original entry, Khan’s team wrote that the agency was “increasingly taking note of AI’s potential for real-world instances of harm—from incentivizing commercial surveillance to enabling fraud and impersonation to perpetuating illegal discrimination.”
The agency has not provided an explanation for the removals. An FTC spokesperson did not reply to requests for comment. Khan, through a spokesperson, declined to comment.
Former FTC public affairs director Douglas Farrar said he was particularly surprised that the open-weights post was pulled, given the agency’s role in policing AI markets. “I was shocked to see the Ferguson FTC be so out of line with the Trump White House on this signal to the market,” he says, referring to newly appointed FTC chair Andrew Ferguson.
The Trump administration’s AI Action Plan, released in July, states that “we need to ensure America has leading open models founded on American values” and that “the Federal government should create a supportive environment for open models.” The FTC did not reply to questions about whether the deletions represent a change in agency policy.
A number of advisers working with the White House on technology matters, including David Sacks, special adviser to the White House on AI and crypto, and Sriram Krishnan, a senior policy adviser to the White House on AI, have urged support for open source AI and framed it as a tool for preserving U.S. technological leadership.
Since President Trump returned to the White House in January, the commission has taken down hundreds of blog entries and pieces of business guidance that were posted during Khan’s tenure, according to public records and interviews. In March, the agency removed roughly 300 items related to AI, consumer protection, and litigation against large tech companies. One of those posts, “The Luring Test: AI and the engineering of consumer trust,” offered companies guidance on how to avoid building deceptive AI chatbots and had won an award from the Aspen Institute in 2023 for its clear explanations of artificial intelligence.
An FTC staffer told reporters in March that taking public blogs offline “raises serious compliance concerns under the Federal Records Act and the Open Government Data Act,” statutes that require federal agencies to preserve records with administrative, legal, or historical value and to make many of those records accessible to the public. During the previous administration, FTC leadership had placed “warning” labels on business directives and other guidance that originated under earlier leadership and that current officials said they disagreed with.
More than 200 posts and statements authored by Khan remained on the FTC website as of this report. Those include a September 2024 blog outlining enforcement actions the agency said it had taken against allegedly deceptive AI schemes, a 2024 joint statement from the FTC and other groups on competition in the market for generative AI foundation models, and remarks from a 2023 roundtable on generative AI in which Khan said the agency was “looking closely at how AI can turbocharge fraud” and “entrench the dominance of the firms that control necessary raw inputs,” among other harms.