The FTC Is Disappearing Blog Posts About AI Published During Lina Khan’s Tenure
End of July In 2024, Lina Khan, then chair of the United States Federal Trade Commission, gave a speech at an event hosted by San Francisco startup accelerator Y Combinator, in which she positioned 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 California Governor Gavin Newsom later vetoed, 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, “small players can commercialize their ideas.”
In the days leading up to the event, Khan’s staff posted a blog on the agency’s website emphasizing similar talking points. The article notes that the term “open source” has been used to describe AI models with various characteristics. The authors instead suggested adopting the term “open weight,” meaning a model whose training weights are made public, allowing anyone to inspect, modify, or reuse it.
The Trump administration has since deleted the blog post, two sources familiar with the matter told WIRED. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine shows that the FTC’s July 10, 2024 blog post titled “On Open-Weights Foundation Models” was redirected on September 1 of this year to a landing page from the FTC’s technology office.
Another article from October 2023 titled “Consumers voice concerns about AI,” written by two FTC technologists, now similarly redirects to the agency’s Office of Technology home page. According to Wayback Machine, the redirect took place in late August this year.
A third FTC article on AI, authored by Khan’s team and published on January 3, 2025, titled “AI and the Risk of Consumer Harm,” now leads to an error screen reading “Page not found.” According to the Wayback Machine, this blog post was still live on the FTC’s website on August 12, but by August 15 it had been removed from the Internet. In the original post, Khan’s team wrote that the agency was “increasingly taking note of the potential for AI harm in the real world — from inciting commercial surveillance to fraud and identity theft to perpetuating unlawful discrimination.”
It is unclear 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.
