The FTC Is Disappearing Blog Posts About AI Published During Lina Khan's Tenure

"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."

"In the days leading up to the event, Khan's staff published a blog on the agency's website emphasizing similar talking points. The piece noted that "open source" had been used to describe AI models with a variety of different characteristics. The authors instead suggested adopting the term "open-weight," 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 Archive's Wayback Machine shows that the July 10, 2024, FTC blog titled "On Open-Weights Foundation Models" was redirected on September 1 of this year to a landing page for the FTC's Office of Technology. Another post from October 2023 titled "Consumers Are Voicing Concerns About AI," authored by two FTC technologists, now similarly redirects back to the agency's Office of Technology landing page. According to the Wayback Machine, the redirect occurred in late August of this year."

Lina Khan spoke at a Y Combinator event in July 2024 advocating for open-source and open-weight AI, arguing that accessible models enable smaller entrants to bring ideas to market. California lawmakers were considering SB 1047, which would have imposed testing and safety requirements on AI companies; critics warned the bill could impede open-source model releases and Governor Gavin Newsom later vetoed it. Khan’s staff published a blog promoting the "open-weight" term to describe models with publicly released training weights. Several FTC posts about AI, including the July 10, 2024, and October 2023 entries, were later removed or redirected, and a January 3, 2025 post now leads to an error screen.

Read at WIRED