America’s AI Action Plan & the Culture Industries
What looks like an infrastructure strategy is actually a cultural rewrite that reframes creativity as policy-compliant output and storytelling as soft power.
Yes, yes — I know.
I owe you the Attention Economy series and the gaming intel drop. It’s coming. I swear on Sam Altman’s perfectly moisturised face.
But while I was delayed like a godless content goblin, Trump dropped the AI plan to end all AI plans.
If you think it’s just another innovation whitepaper, think again. It reads like The Art of the Deal re-skinned as Call of Duty: Culture Wars Edition. Part Cold War cosplay, part deregulation speedrun, the AI Action Plan reimagines artificial intelligence not as a tool, but as territory to be scaled, defended, exported, and, frankly, exploited.
So while headlines focused on compute and chips, I read the whole thing. And what I saw was a seismic shift — one that will shape not just which models get built, but how we tell stories, make games, license music, publish books, and produce film and television for the next decade. And no one seemed to be focusing on our industries.
So I will. First, the 5 biggest takeaways. Then, the 5 ways this plan will impact culture, broken down for the industries that actually move hearts, shape memory, and pay freelance invoices:
Film & TV
Video Games
Music
Publishing
Streaming & International Co-Productions
5 Big Take Aways
1. AI Isn’t a Tool — It’s Territory
Welcome to the API Cold War
Forget “transformational tech.” This plan treats AI like it’s a nuclear deterrent with better branding.
Trump’s team literally calls this a “race for global dominance”, which is how you know it was written by someone who thinks Oppenheimer was a how-to manual.
China is the final boss. LLMs are weapons. And America’s model stack is now considered a sovereign export asset… the generative version of oil, but with fewer spills and more copyright lawsuits.
They even propose evaluating Chinese models for “CCP alignment” — which, depending on how Meta’s doing this week, might include Threads.
This isn’t about building AI. What we’re talking about is staking out the territory of reality itself, and making sure it speaks fluent English and votes right of centre.
2. Build, Baby, Build (Then Dismantle the Safety Rails)
Speed Is the Virtue. Regulation Is Cancel Culture for Data Centres.
The plan nukes Biden’s AI safety executive order like it was a gender studies major.
90+ federal rollbacks target permitting, climate review, and any framework that dares mention fairness, ethics, or… vibes.
Climate language? Deleted. DEI? Scrubbed. Misinformation? Not real. Instead, we get “AI energy dominance”, which sounds like a Marvel villain but is actually an entire section about fossil-fuel-powered inference zones.
The guiding ethos? If your model can’t be deployed faster than it can be questioned, you’re doing it wrong.
It’s Silicon Valley speed ideology meets federal muscle, with just enough Mad Max to keep the lawyers awake.
3. Open-Weight, Closed Agenda
Exporting Freedom, One LoRA at a Time
Open-source models used to be about transparency. Now they’re about freedom. American freedom.™
The feds will favour “open-weight models built on American values.” Translation: must be usable in Iowa and ignore sea level rise.
Objectivity is redefined here as “not referencing DEI, climate science, or progressive policy.” We’ve entered the Fox News fork of Mistral.
These models aren’t just for researchers. They’ll be exported like diplomatic care packages, complete with API access and zero risk of questioning the Second Amendment.
Think of it as GitHub meets geopolitics, where the license isn’t MIT, it’s MAGA.
4. The Grid Is the New Battlefield
Your GPU Usage Is Now a National Security Event
America is building a compute stack like it’s prepping for a boss fight with Skynet and Greta Thunberg at the same time.
Massive military-grade data centres? Check. Grid reform prioritising AI over renewables? Double check. AI literacy for military cadets? Triple check and a protein shake.
Fossil fuels aren’t a climate risk anymore, they’re AI fuel. Permitting reform ensures your next GPT deployment runs on the dreams of melting glaciers.
Even the workforce strategy is retooled. Electricians, HVAC techs, and “AI-ready soldiers” are the new innovation class. Welcome to the age of blue-collar techno-nationalism.
This is Compute Manifest Destiny, and your transformer model is now a patriot.
5. Standards Bodies, But Make It a Purge
If It Sounds Too Fair, Kill It
The final act? Standards re-education.
The plan demands NIST remove all mentions of DEI, climate, and “misinformation” from its AI Risk Management Framework. Because truth, apparently, is only trustworthy when it’s politically convenient.
Federal procurement will now prioritise models that are “free from ideological bias”, which is a polite way of saying: no model that tells your uncle he’s wrong about vaccines.
And just in case this felt subtle, the EU’s AI Act is framed as “ideological capture” — setting up a transatlantic collision between explainability and expressiveness, i.e. “Can your model both make art and pass a Senate hearing?”
It’s less “responsible AI” and more “AI that won’t embarrass us on Newsmax.” And that’s the whole point.
Hollywood, Meet Haliburton: 5 Ways This Plan Mutates Culture Industries
If Part I was about nation-building through model weights, this is about what happens when culture gets absorbed into the defence-industrial stack. Spoiler: it’s not more art. It’s more “content.” Made faster. With fewer people. And probably in Texas.
1. Media Can Now Deploy AI Like It’s a Legal Weapon
(And That’s a Direct Threat to Human Creativity)
The Action Plan creates the perfect conditions for companies to ramp up AI across VFX, dubbing, localisation, scriptwriting, and synthetic performance with zero federal oversight and maximum legal ambiguity.
There are no creative guardrails: no protections around likeness, voice, or narrative automation. IP rights are deliberately outsourced to the courts, not legislation — which means protections will only come after the damage is done.
This deregulation doesn’t just allow experimentation, it incentivises industrial-scale replacement. If you're a production exec with 37 local markets to serve and a dubbing budget to slash? Congrats! The government just cosigned your synthetic actor pipeline.
Welcome to the era of “legally fine” fake humans. Realism optional. Consent negotiable. Residuals? Don’t ask.
This isn’t a win for innovation. It’s a structural bypass of everything SAG-AFTRA, WGA, and creatives fought for in 2023–24.
The plan doesn’t mention artists once. Because it doesn’t see them as stakeholders, just cost centres in need of automation. And that silence is the signal.
2. A Creative Arms Race in Games and Tools Is Coming
Open-weight models will flood the indie and AA game space, giving smaller studios powerful tools once locked behind closed APIs.
Think: fully customisable LLM-powered NPCs, procedurally generated quests, lore generation on tap, now without the licensing fees.
Modders and community devs will gain access to uncensored, unsupervised, unregulated AI backends, leading to some brilliant design breakthroughs... and some lawsuits you can’t unsee.
Expect to see a new divide: AAA studios using closed, brand-safe models, and everyone else using spicy, U.S.-blessed open-weight weirdness. Baldur’s Gate 3 meets Roko’s Basilisk.
This is Unity-era disruption, but for AI-native worldbuilding. And it’s going to be messy, magical, and probably NSFW.
3. International Co-Productions Just Got a Compliance Nightmare
Say goodbye to clean cross-border AI workflows. This plan sets the U.S. and EU on a direct regulatory collision course.
Europe’s AI Act requires explainability, fairness, DEI, and harm mitigation in model deployment, all of which the U.S. plan just purged from federal standards.
What happens when a French writer, a U.S. studio, and a German post house co-develop a partially AI-written series? Legal limbo.
Expect friction over training data provenance, model selection, and AI-generated likeness rights in every co-pro contract from here on out.
In other words: streamers will still want global content, but their lawyers are about to go feral.
4. Publishing and Music Face a “Compliance-Free” AI Flood
With no meaningful restrictions on training data or output provenance, AI-generated books, audiobooks, music, and even fanfic get a massive federal tailwind.
The plan doesn’t touch copyright, which means models trained on Stephen King, Taylor Swift, or Wikipedia can generate derivative works with no clear line of liability.
Publishers and labels are on their own. And unless they litigate aggressively, the next hit might be ghostwritten by a GPU on a server in Nevada.
For music: expect a wave of synthetic vocals and AI-composed tracks optimised for Spotify’s payout algo, not human ears. (“Post-Malone-core” gets literal.)
This isn’t the death of creative work, but it is the death of assuming the creator was human.
5. Narrative Legibility Becomes a Political Question
When the U.S. mandates that only “non-ideological” models get federal contracts and simultaneously funds open-weight tool, it’s not just setting technical standards. It’s deciding which cultural narratives are institutionally legible.
Models that foreground systemic inequality, queer experience, climate trauma, or colonial critique? Potentially disqualified as “biased.”
Models that generate patriotic, family-safe, high-engagement content optimised for mass distribution? Fast-tracked.
The long-term outcome? A bifurcated narrative stack: State-backed models for legibility and virality, community models for resistance and experimentation.
And that’s the real kicker: this isn’t just about what stories get told (it never is). Now we’re actively moving into what kinds of story logic get infrastructure-level support.