The FTC Is Removing AI-Related Blog Posts Released Under Lina Khan’s Leadership

In late July 2024, Lina Khan, who was the chair of the US Federal Trade Commission, delivered a speech at an event hosted by the San Francisco startup accelerator Y Combinator, where she positioned herself as a supporter of open source artificial intelligence.

This event occurred as California lawmakers were deliberating on a groundbreaking bill known as SB 1047, which aimed to introduce new testing and safety requirements for AI companies. Opponents of the bill, which was ultimately vetoed by California governor Gavin Newsom, claimed that it would stifle the progress and deployment of open source AI models. Khan advocated for a more lenient approach, asserting that with open models accessible, “smaller players can bring their ideas to market.”

Leading up to the event, Khan’s team published a blog on the agency’s website that echoed similar themes. The article pointed out that “open source” has been used to refer to AI models with various characteristics. The authors proposed instead to use the term “open-weight,” signifying a model for which the training weights are publicly available, enabling anyone to inspect, alter, or reuse it.

According to two sources familiar with the situation, the Trump administration has since deleted that blog post, as reported by WIRED. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine indicates that the July 10, 2024, FTC blog post titled “On Open-Weights Foundation Models” was redirected on September 1 of this year to a page for the FTC’s Office of Technology.

Another blog post from October 2023, titled “Consumers Are Voicing Concerns About AI,” written by two FTC technologists, now redirects to the agency’s Office of Technology landing page as well. The Wayback Machine reports that this redirect took place in late August of this year.

A third FTC blog about AI, authored by Khan’s team and published on January 3, 2025, titled “AI and the Risk of Consumer Harm,” now leads to a “Page not found” error screen. The Wayback Machine documents that this blog was still accessible on the FTC’s website as of August 12, but had been taken down by August 15. In the original content, Khan’s staff indicated that the agency was “increasingly taking note of AI’s potential for real-world instances of harm—from incentivizing commercial surveillance to enabling fraud and impersonation to perpetuating illegal discrimination.”

The reasons for the removal of these blog posts from the internet remain unclear. An FTC spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. Khan, through a representative, declined to comment.