This post is part of Hub and Spoke series on Antitrust Policy under Trump 2.0 and Artificial Intelligence. You can find previous examples here: Use of Consent Decrees Under Trump 2.0, New Developments in the Treatment of Pricing Algorithms, UPDATE: Government Recalibrates AI Remedies in Google Search case, An Eye for an AI? Proposed Google Search Remedies Target Artificial Intelligence.
By Ethan Litwin and Keagan Potts
Just over seven months into President Trump’s second term, we are starting to get a clearer picture of his antitrust priorities. So far, federal antitrust enforcers have largely played good cop with companies seeking merger approval and bad cop with the Tech Titans.[1] Trump’s antitrust agenda has emerged simultaneously with the release of the President’s AI Action Plan. While the plan itself does not state a clear role for the antitrust enforcers, several other recent developments illuminate how the Antitrust Division and the FTC may continue policing big tech companies consistent with the President’s particular AI policies and his broader economic agenda.
Trump Rolls Out AI Action Plan
Announced on July 23, the President’s AI Action Plan sets policy goals to help America win the AI race.[2] The AI Action Plan in many respects adopts a “win at all costs” mentality. For example, the only reference to the FTC is an oblique statement that the agency’s ongoing investigations should “not advance theories of liability that unduly burden AI innovation.”[3] But other sections seek to impose constraints on AI development that conflict with the President’s social agenda. For instance, the Action Plan seeks to “ensure that free speech flourishes in the era of AI and that AI procured by the Federal government objectively reflects truth rather than social engineering agendas.”[4] These constraints extend to other facets of competition more at home with traditional antitrust theory, notably by explicitly encouraging open-source and open-weight AI models.[5] This suggests, and recent actions by antitrust enforcers confirm, that the agencies will continue to target monopolizing conduct of Tech Titans, even where AI technology is involved.
Swelling momentum from Google Ads and Search
Within the past year, the Antitrust Division has notched two landmark victories in antitrust actions against Google. In August, Judge Mehta issued a landmark ruling that Google has monopoly power in general search and search-adjacent text advertising.[6] In April, another key pillar of Google’s power was declared unlawful, when Judge Brinkema found Google has monopolized the markets for ad servers and ad exchanges.[7] In that case, Judge Brinkema explained that walled-garden publishers, including Google’s search engine, “maintain their own in-house ad tech and require advertisers to use those tools to buy and place advertisements on the publishers’ owned-and-operated web properties.”[8] The Google Search remedies trial concluded in May, and the Google Ads remedies trial is scheduled to begin in September. Although the courts have not spoken unanimously on these issues, we may be seeing the end of the “walled garden” approach to building technology ecosystems that, prior to 2016, had enjoyed near-unanimous support (or at least the absence of objection) from enforcers across the political spectrum.
AI products are the next, and quickly developing, frontier, with the potential to disrupt existing “walled gardens” and reset the tech landscape. Enforcers are swiftly moving to ensure that the Tech Titans do not abuse their already dominant positions to monopolize the AI landscape. For example, the Antitrust Division included in its final search remedies proposal provisions that would require Google to disclose stakes in or plans to acquire a query-based AI product and prevent Google from entering exclusive agreements that tie AI products to its dominant search products. While some argue that Google is the most obvious threat to a competitive market for AI development, enforcers can be expected to challenge efforts to thwart the development of open-source AI.
Antitrust enforcement as a vehicle to advance broader policies
Continuing a trend that some trace back to the Biden Administration, the Trump Administration arguably supports the use of antitrust laws to accomplish broader policy objectives. For example, on two recent statements of interest, the federal antitrust enforcers have embraced private plaintiffs’ use of antitrust laws to challenge efforts to combat climate change and to deplatform certain views concerning the COVID-19 pandemic.
In May, the DOJ and FTC filed a joint statement in Texas et al. v. BlackRock, Inc., arguing that BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard’s commitment to use their shares in coal companies to influence those companies to reduce emissions constituted an unlawful agreement to reduce output.[9] This statement was filed the month after President Trump issued an executive order stating that state-level climate, emissions, and Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) laws are “irreconcilable” with Trump’s “objective to unleash American energy.”[10] The statement of interest, however, validates the antitrust concerns regarding horizontal shareholding,[11] perhaps providing a precedent for private enforcement challenging horizontal shareholding outside of the ESG initiatives that offend the President’s agenda. The court in Texas et al. v. BlackRock, Inc. recently refused to dismiss the Plaintiffs’ claims under Sherman Act Section 1 and Clayton Act Section 7.
In June, the DOJ filed a statement of interest in Children’s Health Defense et al. v. Washington Post et. al., contending that “controlling precedent shows that the Sherman Act protects all forms of competition, including competition in information quality.”[12] That case involves allegations that The Washington Post, the British Broadcasting Corp., the Associated Press, and Reuters agreed with social media platforms to exclude from those platforms certain viewpoints regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, the complaint alleges the defendants “targeted claims that, e.g. COVID-19 was ‘manmade,’ ‘manufactured or bioengineered’; ‘COVID is no more dangerous to some populations than the seasonal flu’; face masks, mask mandates, and social distancing ‘do not prevent the spread of COVID’; and ‘immunity from getting COVID is more effective than vaccination.’”[13] This too aligns with a policy objective of President Trump’s, as his administration has prohibited the use of federal funds to support or subsidize vaccine mandates in schools.[14] As a matter of antitrust enforcement policy, this reflects some willingness to recognize a broader conception of antitrust injury that includes non-economic harms such as diminished information quality, as opposed to merely quantifiable economic harms.
Antitrust enforcement necessary to promote development of AI
Finally, the FTC and the Antitrust Division have explicitly recognized the competitive risks created by agreements among companies developing AI technology. For example, in July 2024, the UK Competition and Markets Authority, the Antitrust Division, and the FTC issued a joint statement identifying three risks to competition posed by AI: (1) concentration of key inputs, (2) further entrenchment or extension of current market power, (3) arrangements involving key players.[15]
Additionally, as we have discussed in our previous blog posts on the DOJ’s initial and revised remedies proposals in Google search, enforcers anticipate Google may try to tie emerging AI products to products for which Google dominates the market. Indeed, at least two complaints, one domestic and one foreign, have alleged that it does so.
Antitrust enforcement efforts targeting such conduct would be consistent with the President’s AI Action Plan insofar as they preserve the competitive environment necessary for AI innovation to occur. Taken together, these developments provide good reasons to believe enforcers will continue to use the antitrust laws to limit the ability of the Tech Titans to define their markets through walled gardens, particularly where viewpoints contrary to social and cultural objectives of the Trump Administration flourish.
[1] Alexis Keenan, Trump’s antitrust cops are OK with new mergers. Old tech monopolies, not so much, Yahoo! finance(July 20, 2025), https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trumps-antitrust-cops-are-ok-with-new-mergers-old-tech-monopolies-not-so-much-140038953.html. Indeed, on August 14, 2025, President Trump revoked Former President Biden’s Executive Order on Competition, loosening the regulation of mergers and acquisitions. See FTC Chairman Applauds Revocation of Biden-Harris Executive Order on Competition, Fed. Trade Comm’n (August 14, 2025), https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/08/ftc-chairman-applauds-revocation-biden-harris-executive-order-competition.
[2] Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan, The White House (July 2025), https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Americas-AI-Action-Plan.pdf [hereinafter AI Action Plan].
[3] Id. at 3.
[4] Id. at 4; see also https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/07/preventing-woke-ai-in-the-federal-government/
[5] AI Action Plan at 5.
[6] Wyatt Fore, UPDATE: Government Recalibrates AI Remedies in Google Search case, Shinder Cantor Lerner LLP (Mar. 25, 2025), https://scl-llp.com/update-government-recalibrates-ai-remedies-in-google-search-case/.
[7] Jeff Shinder Quoted by The Hill about Google’s Antitrust Losses, Shinder Cantor Lerner LLP (Apr. 21, 2025), https://scl-llp.com/jeff-shinder-quoted-by-the-hill-about-googles-antitrust-losses/; Ethan Litwin and Keagan Potts, Google’s DoubleClick Acquisition: A Case Study Highlighting the Conglomerate Merger Blind Spot in U.S. Antitrust Enforcement, Shinder Cantor Lerner LLP (June 23, 2025), https://scl-llp.com/googles-doubleclick-acquisition-a-case-study-highlighting-the-conglomerate-merger-blind-spot-in-u-s-antitrust-enforcement/
[8] United States v. Google LLC, Case No. 1:23-cv-108 (LMB/JFA) (E.D.V.A. Apr. 17, 2025) (“Google AdTech decision”) (available at https://www.adexchanger.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Judge-Leonie-Brinkema-ad-tech-decision-DOJ-Google.pdf)
[9] Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission File Statement of Interest on Anticompetitive Uses of Common Shareholdings to Discourage Coal Production, Dep’t of Justice (May 22, 2025), https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-and-federal-trade-commission-file-statement-interest-anticompetitive-uses; Keagan Potts, Anti-ESG Sentiment Spurs States to Test Horizontal Shareholding Antitrust Theory, Shinder Cantor Lerner LLP (Dec. 10, 2024), https://scl-llp.com/anti-esg-sentiment-spurs-states-to-test-horizontal-shareholding-antitrust-theory/.
[10] Exec. Order No. 14,260, available at https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/protecting-american-energy-from-state-overreach/
[11] See, e.g., Einer Elhague, Horizontal Shareholding, 229 Harv. L. Rev. 1267 (2016), available at https://harvardlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/1267-1317-Online.pdf
[12] Statement of Interest of the United States at 2, Childrens Health Defense, et al. v. WP Co. LLC, 1:23-cv-2735 (D.D.C.), ECF No. 123, available at https://www.justice.gov/atr/media/1407666/
dl?inline.
[13] Id. at 3.
[14] Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Prohibits Federal Funding for COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates in Schools, The White House (Feb. 14, 2025), https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/02/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-prohibits-federal-funding-for-covid-19-vaccine-mandates-in-schools/.
[15] Joint statement on competition in generative AI foundation models and AI products, U.K. Competition & Mkts. Auth. (July 23, 2024), https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/
joint-statement-on-competition-in-generative-ai-foundation-models-and-ai-products/joint-statement-on-competition-in-generative-ai-foundation-models-and-ai-products
