FTC disappears blog posts about artificial intelligence published during Lina Khan’s tenure

In late July 2024, Lina Khanwho was then head of the US Federal Trade Commission, gave a speech at an event hosted by startup accelerator Y Combinator in San Francisco where she said She put herself As an advocate for open source AI.

The event occurred while 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 California Governor Gavin Newsom later vetoed, argued that it would hinder the development and launch of open source AI models. Khan called for a less restrictive approach, and said that with open models available to them, “smaller players can bring their ideas to market.”

In the days leading up to the event, Khan’s team posted a blog post on the agency’s website emphasizing similar talking points. The article noted that “open source” has been used to describe AI models that have a variety of different characteristics. Instead, the authors suggested adopting the term “open weight,” i.e. a model that has its own characteristics Training weights They are released publicly, allowing anyone to inspect, modify, or reuse them.

The Trump administration has since removed that blog post, two sources familiar with the matter told WIRED. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine shows that an FTC blog post dated July 10, 2024 titled “On Open-Weights Foundation Models” It has been redirected on September 1 of this year to the FTC’s (FTC) Technology Office landing page.

Another post from October 2023 titled “Consumers Express Concerns About AI,” written by two FTC technologists, now similarly redirects back to the landing page for the agency’s technology office. According to the Wayback Machine, Redirection occurred In late August of this year.

A third FTC publication on AI, written by Khan’s team and published on January 3, 2025, titled “AI and the Risks of Consumer Harm,” now results in an error screen saying “Page not found.” According to the Wayback Machine, this blog post was still on the FTC’s website as of August 12, but by August 15 it had been removed from the internet. In the original post, Khan’s staff wrote that the agency is “increasingly taking into account AI’s potential for real-world harm — from catalyzing commercial surveillance to enabling fraud and impersonation to perpetuating unlawful discrimination.”

It is not clear why the blog posts were removed from the Internet. An FTC spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. Khan, through his spokesman, declined to comment.