The White House artificial intelligence plan says nothing about patents and pushes open weights and full-stack exports

2025-07-23US Policy

The White House, "Winning the Race: America's AI Action Plan" (July 23, 2025), issued with Executive Orders "Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government," "Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure" and "Promoting the Export of the American AI Technology Stack" (July 23, 2025)

The White House released a plan organized in three pillars, accelerating innovation, building infrastructure, and leading in international diplomacy and security, each with recommended policy actions for federal agencies, and the President signed three executive orders the same day. The plan does not use the words patent, copyright or fair use, and does not mention the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Intellectual property appears once, in a section titled "Protect Commercial and Government AI Innovations," which states that the government must address security risks to American companies, "talent, intellectual property, and systems," and recommends that the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, the Center for AI Standards and Innovation and the intelligence community work with leading developers to defend their innovations against threats including malicious cyber actors and insiders. A section titled "Encourage Open-Source and Open-Weight AI" describes such models as "made freely available by developers for anyone in the world to download and modify" and recommends actions to expand access to computing for startups and academics and to drive adoption of open models by small and medium-sized businesses. The export order directs the Secretary of Commerce, within 90 days, to establish an American exports program and to call for proposals from industry-led consortia for full-stack packages combining chips and servers, "data pipelines and labeling systems," models, security measures and applications for specific uses.

What it changesFederal policy will not settle eligibility, inventorship or the copyright status of training data; those questions stay with the courts, the Office and Congress, and patent budgets should assume no relief from this plan. Two parts of the plan still change patent decisions. The push for open-weight models matters because a released model, its weights and its technical report are published prior art everywhere on the day of release, so any company answering that call should decide which architecture, training and serving inventions to file on before release rather than after. The export program will put American model and infrastructure packages into allied markets selected by Commerce, and foreign filing budgets for model, data pipeline and data center inventions should follow the markets those consortia enter. The plan's language on insider threats fits a trade secret program and offers no substitute for one.

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Burbage Law is the practice of Jon Burbage, a registered patent attorney. 342 United States patents have issued from applications he wrote; the full list is on the Patents page. More about Jon Burbage.

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