Voters in the US have decided: Donald Trump will return to the White House in January. The change of administration has created some question marks around what could come next for any nascent regulatory regime around generative AI in Washington.

The likely answer is that strong, large-scale AI regulation will remain paused for the foreseeable future. Trump has vowed to reverse President Joe Biden’s signature achievement on the issue—a wide-ranging executive order. And experts say that a big legislative push, which was already in a holding pattern during election season, isn’t likely to pick up steam again under Republican control, though there have been reports of a potential lame-duck rush before Trump takes office.

Despite counting Vice President-elect JD Vance and a few GOP members of Congress as fans, Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan will likely lose her job as the agency backs off of its aggressive stance on M&A, experts said. That would probably mean an end to the FTC’s antitrust investigations into partnerships between tech giants and flush AI startups, like Microsoft and OpenAI or Amazon and Anthropic.

Those are guesses from experts about what the administration is not going to do. But there are still many unknowns about what efforts to guardrail AI might look like under Trump, who last held the presidency when commercial AI still largely meant traditional machine learning, and ChatGPT had yet to send the world into a frenzy.

Keep reading here.—PK

Much of the Biden administration’s climate policy centered on driving decarbonization of transportation by incentivizing electrification.

With a second Trump presidency looming, there’s uncertainty about how, exactly, the president-elect’s promises of sweeping change will affect the transition to zero-emissions vehicles. But experts say Republicans’ sweep in the latest US election is likely to bring seismic change. Trump, after all, made anti-EV rhetoric a cornerstone of his campaign.

Here are ways the next Trump administration and its allies in a Republican-controlled Congress stand to reshape EV policies.

IRA incentives: Trump has vowed to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, which dedicated hundreds of billions of dollars to the clean-energy transition, or to rescind unallocated IRA funds.

Experts say that a full repeal is unlikely, in part because the majority of the investments spurred by the legislation have flowed to GOP congressional districts. Clean-energy sector leaders have warned that a rollback would lead to widespread layoffs and business closures, and even a group of Republican legislators has argued against repealing the law.

“There’s this tension between, do you want to ‘own the libs’ and get rid of their signature piece of legislation, or do you want to represent your constituents’ economic interests?” MIT Sloan economist Catherine Wolfram, former deputy assistant secretary for climate and energy economics in the Biden administration, wrote.

“The political theory behind the IRA was that a lot of the investment would go into red congressional districts and red states, and that that would give it some permanence,” Wolfram told us. “We’ll see whether that political theory bears out.”

Keep reading here.—JG

President-elect Donald Trump deviates heavily from current President Joe Biden with respect to his views on the environment. He has called the climate crisis a hoax, and said “who the hell cares?” in response to a question about the sea level rising.

And his purported policies are in step with his controversial statements, though some green tech experts don’t think even Trump’s anti-green attitude can outweigh the fact that clean energy is cheaper than the alternatives.

Drill, baby, drill: Trump has promised to increase production of fossil fuels, the greatest accelerator of the climate crisis. He has also said he wants to drill for fossil fuels in the Arctic wilderness, which he says would contribute to the US having the “No. 1 lowest cost energy and electricity on Earth.”

Cameron Dales, the president and CCO of Peak Energy, which deploys large-scale sodium-ion batteries, told Tech Brew that Trump will be able to achieve the lowest-cost energy through renewables, not drilling for fossil fuels.

“An economy that is productive, and a country that wants to be a world power, needs to have access to low cost, reliable energy,” Dales said, “whether that’s for powering AI data centers or manufacturing or just everyday life.”

Keep reading here.—TC

Usually, we write about the business of tech. Here, we highlight the *tech* of tech.

Finally clean: Do you need an online activity that’s not doomscrolling Bluesky? The New York Times has a writeup of a video game called PowerWash Simulator, which may very well be the fun, soothing, repetitive task we need right now.

Classified: Ever wish you could post a free table on Facebook Marketplace without getting roped back into managing a stream of friend requests from people you went to high school with? Us, too. And regulators across the pond apparently had the same thought: The European Commission yesterday fined Meta nearly $850 million “after regulators accused Facebook’s parent company of stifling competition by ‘tying’ its free Marketplace services with the social network,” the Financial Times reported.