While the United States develops its own artificial intelligence (AI) regulatory framework, it’s encouraging other countries to take up similar performance-based approaches to AI governance instead of pursuing centralized global regulation, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Ethan Klein said Tuesday.
Last year, the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan called on the Departments of Commerce and State to partner with industry to provide full-stack AI export packages to American allies – including hardware, models, software, applications, and standards.
That initiative was created to push American values as the leading influence on AI innovation and deployment across the globe instead of Chinese values, which U.S. federal officials warned would pose a national security threat.
While speaking at an Information Technology Industry Council event Tuesday, Klein said that while the United States wants to lead in AI, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s (OSTP) end goal isn’t for all global regulatory systems to exactly mimic U.S. frameworks, but instead take a similar sector-specific regulatory approach.
“If we’re developing the technology here, we’re manufacturing that technology here, it’s subject to the regulatory and policy frameworks that we have set up within the United States, which I think to a large extent, are sector specific, use-case specific,” Klein explained.
He said that exporting that U.S. technology could encourage allies to adopt similar regulatory standards that allow innovation to be tested before imposing stricter regulations.
“Our [OSTP] director, Michael Kratsios, has spoken out … against AI global governance, and instead enabling countries to [get] … towards tech sovereignty, allowing each country to say. ‘How do these technologies fit into our own kind of policy frameworks?’” Klein said.
“We’re working through those kind of frameworks, and then we’re trying to distill that down to the set of principles that we’ve seen to be so successful in making America the best place to develop technologies – AI and otherwise,” Klein added.
To do this, Klein said that the United States has been working to establish foreign partnerships, such as technology prosperity deals that President Donald Trump signed with the United Kingdom, South Korea, and Japan.
With more international collaboration in AI test beds and innovation, Klein said that he’s optimistic about AI’s potential to produce numerous benefits across sectors including healthcare, education, and transportation.
“I think what we’ve seen is that there’s a lot of countries that are extremely excited about the future of technology, and they found that the United States is a great partner in working with to enjoy those benefits,” Klein said.
In December 2025, Trump signed an executive order aimed at curbing state AI regulations and pushing for a unified national AI policy framework. Currently, there are no federal regulations on AI.