President Donald Trump is slated as the keynote speaker for a Wednesday artificial intelligence summit in Washington that is expected to coincide with his administration’s release of a long-awaited federal action plan on the technology.

An executive order signed by Trump in late January called for the development of an AI action plan within 180 days led by David Sacks, a special White House advisor for AI and crypto, among other administration officials.

“The forthcoming AI action plan will be the most substantive stance on AI from the Trump administration since returning to office,” Hodan Omaar, a senior policy analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington think tank, said in an email.

While many of the administration’s AI priorities — such as accelerating infrastructure needed for the technology and addressing energy demand — have already been telegraphed through Office of Management and Budget guidance, White House fact sheets, and policy remarks, the plan is expected to consolidate those signals into a clearer policy direction, according to Omaar, who focuses on AI policy at ITIF’s Center for Data Innovation.

“The plan should give companies much-needed clarity on where the federal government is heading — what priorities it will back, what barriers it intends to lower, and how aggressively it plans to scale up national AI infrastructure,” she said.

The upcoming talk will be Trump's first major address on the topic of AI since the start of his second term as president, according to a press release issued by the event organizers: the Hill and Valley Forum, a group focused on bringing together Washington policymakers and Silicon Valley leaders, as well as the All‑In Podcast, a tech podcast whose hosts include Sacks.

The president’s Jan. 23 executive order affirmed his administration’s commitment to solidifying America’s AI dominance globally. It also called for federal agency heads to review Biden-era AI policies and regulations and revoke any that might act as a barrier to U.S. innovation in the space.

“One of the themes that we’ve seen in this administration is really a focus on pro-innovation policies and less of a focus on issues around the potential harms of AI,” Paul Lekas, head of global public policy and government affairs at the Software & Information Industry Association, said in an interview.

Lekas said he expects the administration’s action plan to focus on areas such as AI infrastructure as well as public-private partnerships to help drive innovation.

He said industry is hoping to see the administration weigh in on the growing patchwork of AI regulation at the state level as well.

Earlier this month, during the final stages of the so-called Big Beautiful Bill Act’s passage, the Senate stripped a provision that would have barred states from regulating AI for the next 10 years.

“I think this will be a conversation that starts to heat up after we understand where the White House is and what is in the action plan,” Lekas said. “We do think that a federal framework is the right approach here. It’s very hard to address this kind of technology on a state-by-state basis. Uniformity is really important.”

In comments filed earlier this year with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the SIIA said the AI action plan “should advance measures to preempt onerous and inconsistent … state legislation and support America’s AI leadership on the global stage.”

In all, OSTP received over 10,000 public comments from a wide range of parties — including academia, industry groups and state governments — on the administration’s effort to craft an action plan, according to the White House.

On the first day of his second term in the White House, Trump rescinded a sweeping Biden-era AI executive order that called for guardrails to address the technology’s risks, such as the potential for harm to privacy and the displacement of workers.

“There is a view that there were too many restrictions on AI innovation under the prior administration,” Lekas said.

But the Trump administration hasn’t completely avoided AI regulation either, according to Matthew Ferraro, a partner at law firm Crowell & Moring who focuses on complex regulatory matters at the intersection of advanced technology, national security and crisis management.

“There have been quite explicit statements from the White House that AI should not be ‘woke,’” said Ferraro, who previously served as a senior advisor on cybersecurity and emerging technology issues at the Department of Homeland Security during the Biden administration. “That is in a way regulatory.”