The FTC Is Disappearing Blog Posts About AI Published During Lina Khan’s Tenure

At the end of July 2024, Lina KhanThen chair of the US Federal Trade Commission, gave a speech at an event hosted by San Francisco startup accelerator Y Combinator where he Position yourself As an advocate for open source artificial intelligence.

The incident occurred as California lawmakers were considering a landmark bill called SB 1047 that would impose 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 publication of open source AI models. Khan called for a less restrictive approach and said 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 wide variety of features. The authors suggest instead adopting the term “open-weight”, meaning a model that has Training weights Published publicly, allowing anyone to inspect, modify or reuse it.

The Trump administration has removed that blog post, two sources familiar with the matter told Wired. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine shows that the July 10, 2024, FTC blog titled “On Open-Weights Foundation Model” was redirected September 1 of this year on a landing page for the FTC’s Office of Technology.

Another October 2023 post titled “Consumers Are Voicing Concerns About AI,” written by two FTC technicians, is now similarly redirected to the agency’s Office of Technology landing page. According to Wayback Machine, Redirection has occurred At the end of August this year.

A third FTC post about AI authored 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 blog post was still live on the FTC’s website as of August 12, but by August 15 it had been removed from the Internet. In the original post, Khan’s staff wrote that the agency is “increasingly taking note of AI’s potential for real-world harm — from encouraging commercial surveillance to enabling fraud and impersonation to perpetuate illegal discrimination.”

It is not clear why the blog posts were removed from the Internet. An FTC spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. Khan, through a spokesperson, declined to comment.