The US President Donald Trump’s revocation of the Biden-era Executive Order to deregulate the development of AI and ensure the country’s leadership in the space could radically change the way AI (artificial intelligence) is progressing.
With this, global approach to regulating AI is at a crossroads now. The US is expected to roll back any regulations that are holding back the AI industry. With each region pursuing its own AI policies, efforts to harmonise regulations and establish standards for AI governance will be difficult, experts feel.
While the US appears to be deciding to deregulate to foster unbridled innovation, others, such as the EU and India, are advocating for a path with caution, taking into consideration data privacy and ethics.
Rajat Arya, Founder and CEO of 169Pi, feels that the US deregulation gambit is less a death knell for global AI than a call to arms. For India and other South East Asian innovators, the playbook should focus on exploiting asymmetries (ex: local domain expertise and ethical branding).
169Pi is developing Alpie, an AI-powered platform to help organisations simplify and automate tasks through advanced machine learning and automation tools.
“They should also focus on insulating against shocks such as GPU diversification and forming regional compute alliances. Shaping the narrative to position your region as the responsible AI counterweight to US-China extremes,” he pointed out.
Deregulation issues
“The companies that thrive will treat deregulation not as a threat but as a catalyst to redefine global AI’s ethical and technological frontiers, he felt.
Abishek Sengupta, Practice Director, Everest Group, said that the US and Europe seemed to be pulling in opposite directions when it came to the innovation vs regulation debate.
“Trump’s approach is to have unshackle innovation in AI by reducing regulations. While this may indeed boost innovation on one hand, on the other hand it may increase public risk due to a reduction in AI safety guardrails,” he said.
“On a global scale, AI companies are likely to flock to regions that have less red tape. As such, expect AI regulations to become competitive – if the US offers unnaturally loose AI regulations, it may attract promising AI start-ups from other countries to set up shop in the US,” he said.
“Beyond this, for India, the export controls on chips will be another key factor determining the speed at which India can scale its AI infrastructure,” he said.
Kashyap Kompella, an AI analyst closely following the space, pointed out that Trump had rescinded the Biden Executive Order. “But he hasn’t rolled back the export controls on AI models/chips issued by the Biden admin in mid-January,” he said.
AI: Indian vision
Referring to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s address at the Paris AI summit, he said that the Indian vision aligned more with the EU vision rather than the current US administration’s anticipated AI policies.
Terming the ‘positive potential of AI’, the Prime Minister flagged the issue of biases that crept into the Large Language Models (such as ChatGPT and DeepSeekR1). “We need to think carefully about this,” he said.
He also called for the development of open source systems that enhanced trust and transparency into AI systems. “We must ensure that technology is rooted in local ecosystems for it to be effective and useful and make it sustainable. AI does not only mean using clean energy. AI models must also be efficient and sustainable in size, data needs and resources requirements,” he said.
This means that the Indian vision for AI is inclusive and responsible, and not the one that is proposed by the Trump administration.
Kompella, however, pointed out that the US has the largest AI ecosystem and industry.
“The US leadership will be a determining factor for the future trajectory of the AI industry,” he noted.
