The Federal Trade Commission has quietly removed several key blog posts about AI risks and open-source models published during Lina Khan's tenure, marking a dramatic shift in the agency's regulatory stance. The deletions include posts advocating for open-weight AI models and warning about consumer harms - moves that contradict the Trump administration's own AI policy goals.
The Federal Trade Commission is systematically erasing its digital footprint from the Lina Khan era, with the Trump administration quietly removing hundreds of blog posts about AI regulation and consumer protection published during the previous chair's tenure.
The most striking deletion involves a July 2024 blog post titled "On Open-Weights Foundation Models," which advocated for a more permissive approach to AI development. The post was removed on September 1, according to Internet Archive records, now redirecting visitors to a generic FTC technology office page.
The timing creates an awkward contradiction. Khan's staff had argued for supporting "open-weight" AI models - those with publicly released training parameters - as a way to help "smaller players bring their ideas to market." That position aligns perfectly with the Trump administration's own AI Action Plan, which explicitly states the government "should create a supportive environment for open models."
Yet newly appointed FTC chair Andrew Ferguson's team scrubbed the very blog posts that supported this approach. Former FTC public affairs director Douglas Farrar tells WIRED he was "shocked to see the Ferguson FTC be so out of line with the Trump White House on this signal to the market."
Two other AI-focused posts met similar fates. "Consumers Are Voicing Concerns About AI" from October 2023 disappeared in late August, while "AI and the Risk of Consumer Harm" - published as recently as January 2025 - now shows a "Page not found" error. That final post had warned about AI's potential for "incentivizing commercial surveillance" and "perpetuating illegal discrimination."
The deletions represent just the tip of the iceberg. WIRED previously reported that the FTC removed some 300 posts in March related to AI oversight and lawsuits against tech giants like Amazon and Microsoft. Among them was "The Luring Test: AI and the engineering of consumer trust," which had won an award from the Aspen Institute for making AI concepts accessible to the public.
