FTC Removes Lena Khan-Era Posts About Risks of AI and Open Source

The Federal Trade Commission has removed three Lena Khan-era blog posts that addressed open source AI and the risks of AI to consumers, Wired reports.

One post, “On Open Weights Foundation Models,” was published on July 10, 2024. Another, “Consumers Express Concerns About AI,” was published in October 2023. A third article, authored by Khan’s team, was published on January 3, 2025, titled “AI and the Risk of Consumer Harm.” That post noted that the FTC was “considering AI’s potential for real-world harm — from incentivizing commercial surveillance to enabling fraud and impersonation to perpetuating unlawful discrimination.”

TechCrunch has reached out to the FTC to find out why the posts were removed. Khan declined to comment.

These takedowns are part of a broader pattern under the Trump administration, which has begun issuing executive orders directing federal agencies to remove or moderate large amounts of government content.

After his inauguration, Trump also appointed a new FTC chairman and fired several FTC commissioners, installing leadership that focused less on Khan’s aggressive antitrust agenda and more on deregulating Big Tech companies. In September, new FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson made recommendations to eliminate or revise anticompetitive regulations across the entire federal government.

The blog posts recently removed by the FTC, which focused on consumer harm, appear to be in line with the Trump administration’s AI action plan. This plan reduced its focus on safety and guardrails, favoring instead rapid growth and competition with China. However, the Trump administration has been vocal about supporting open source initiatives.

“I was shocked to see that Andrew Ferguson led the FTC to be so out of step with the Trump White House on this reference to the market,” Douglas Farrar, former FTC public affairs director, told TechCrunch.

This is not the first time this administration’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has removed content. In March, Wired reported that the FTC had removed about 300 posts related to artificial intelligence, consumer protection, and lawsuits the agency had filed against tech companies like Amazon and Microsoft.

While hundreds of blog posts from Khan’s tenure and earlier remain on the agency’s technology office blog, the Ferguson FTC has yet to publish any posts on the site, despite the frenetic pace of the AI ​​race, which has led to numerous business mergers and acquisitions — including acquisitive hiring — that could be considered anticompetitive.

The FTC’s blog culling comes on the heels of the Trump administration removing or modifying thousands of government web pages and data sets, especially content related to diversity, equity, and inclusion; sexual identity; public health; And environmental policy. For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has removed data on topics ranging from chronic medical conditions to HIV/AIDS. The Department of Justice has removed studies related to hate crimes, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has removed National Climate Assessment reports issued by Congress.

Removing content — including blog posts from the FTC — could violate the Federal Records Act, which requires federal agencies to properly retain records that document government activities, and the Open Government Data Act, which requires agencies to publish their data as “open data” by default.

The Biden administration’s FTC leadership placed warning labels on content posted during previous administrations that it disagreed with, according to Wired.