How Trump's AI Policy Promotes Ethnonationalism

In a forthcoming paper, George Washington University Law School scholar Spencer Overton argues that the Trump administration's AI policy is consistent with its broader efforts to advance ethnonationalism. By eliminating policies intended to ensure safeguards against algorithmic bias—and recasting work on such problems as ideological threats to innovation—Trump's policies embed exclusion into the technological infrastructure of the future. As a growing body of research suggests, when AI systems operate without regulation, they default to dominant patterns that reproduce racial inequality and suppress cultural pluralism.