The FTC Is Disappearing Blog Posts About AI Published During Lina Khan’s Tenure
End of July 2024, Lina Khanthen the chairman of the US Federal Trade Commission, gave a speech at an event organized by the San Francisco startup accelerator Y Combinator in which she posed herself as an advocate for open source artificial intelligence.
The event took place as California lawmakers considered a landmark bill called SB 1047 that would have imposed new testing and security requirements on AI companies. Critics of the legislation, which was later vetoed by California Governor Gavin Newsom, argued that it would hinder the development and release of open source AI models. Khan called for a less restrictive approach, saying 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 staff published a blog on the agency's website emphasizing similar talking points. The piece noted that “open source” was used to describe AI models with a variety of different characteristics. The authors instead proposed to adopt the term “open weight”, meaning a model that has its training weights publicly released, allowing anyone to inspect, modify or reuse it.
The Trump administration has since removed that blog post, two sources familiar with the matter tell WIRED. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine shows that the July 10, 2024, FTC blog titled “On Open-Weights Foundation Models” was diverted on September 1 of this year to a landing page for the FTC's Office of Technology.
Another October 2023 post titled “Consumers Worry About AI,” written by two FTC technologists, now similarly links back to the agency's Office of Technology landing page. According to the Wayback Machine, the redirection occurred end of August of this year.
A third FTC post about AI that was written by Khan's staff and published on January 3, 2025, titled “AI and the Risk of Consumer Harm,” now leads to an error screen that says “Page not found.” According to the Wayback Machine, that August 12 blog post was still live on the FTC's website, but on August 15 it had been removed from the Internet. In the original post, Khan's staff had written that the agency was “taking increasing notice of AI's potential for real-world cases of harm — from encouraging commercial surveillance to enabling fraud and impersonation to perpetuating illegal discrimination.”
It is not clear why the blog posts were removed from the Internet. An FTC spokesman did not respond to a request for comment. Khan, through a spokesman, declined to comment.
