FTC removes Lina Khan-era posts about AI risks and open source | TechCrunch

The Federal Trade Commission has removed three blog posts from the Lina Khan-era that addressed open-source AI and risks of AI to consumers, according to a Wired report.  

One post, titled “On Open-Weights Foundation Models,” was published July 10, 2024. Another, titled “Consumers Are Voicing Concerns About AI,” came out in October 2023. A third, authored by Khan’s staff, was published on January 3, 2025 with the title “AI and the Risk of Consumer Harm.” That post noted the FTC was “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.” 

TechCrunch has reached out to the FTC to learn why the posts were taken down. Khan declined to comment.  

These removals are part of a broader pattern under the Trump administration, which began issuing executive orders to direct federal agencies to remove or modify substantial amounts of government content.

After his inauguration, Trump also installed a new head of the FTC and removed several FTC commissioners, installing leadership that focused less on Khan’s aggressive antitrust agenda and more on deregulation for Big Tech. In September, new FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson submitted recommendations for deleting or revising anticompetitive regulations across the entire federal government.

The blog posts most recently removed by the FTC, which focused on consumer harm, don’t seem to align with the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan. That plan has reduced its focus on safety and guardrails, instead favoring fast growth and competition with China. However, the Trump administration has been vocal about backing open-source initiatives.  

Former FTC public affairs director Douglas Farrar told TechCrunch: “I was shocked to see that Andrew Ferguson led FTC be so out of line with the Trump White House on this signal to the market.”

This is not the first time this administration’s FTC has removed content. In March, Wired reported that the FTC removed around 300 posts related to AI, consumer protection, and the agency’s lawsuits against tech companies like Amazon and Microsoft.  

While hundreds of blog posts from Khan’s tenure and earlier remain on the agency’s Office of Technology Blog, Ferguson’s FTC has yet to publish any posts to the site, despite the feverish pace of the AI race, which has resulted in several business mergers and acquisitions — including acqui-hires — that could be seen as anticompetitive.

The FTC blog culling follows the Trump administration’s removal or modification of thousands of government web pages and datasets, particularly content related to diversity, equity, and inclusion; gender identity; public health; and environmental policy. For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has removed data on topics ranging from chronic medical conditions to HIV/AIDS. The Justice Department has removed studies on hate crimes, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has taken down the congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment reports.  

The removal of content – including the blog posts from the FTC – could violate the Federal Records Act, which requires federal agencies to preserve records that properly document government activities, and the Open Government Data Act, which requires agencies to publish their data as “open data” by default. 

The Biden administration’s FTC leadership placed warning labels on content published during previous administrations that it disagreed with, according to Wired.