The FTC Is Disappearing Blog Posts About AI Published During Lina Khan’s Tenure (www.wired.com)

Several blog posts and guidance pieces about AI that were published during former FTC chair Lina Khan’s tenure have been removed or redirected from the agency’s website under the current leadership. WIRED and the Wayback Machine show that a July 10, 2024 post titled “On Open-Weights Foundation Models” was redirected to the FTC Office of Technology on Sept. 1, an October 2023 post about consumer concerns was redirected in late August, and a Jan. 3, 2025 post on “AI and the Risk of Consumer Harm” vanished between Aug. 12–15. These removals follow a broader purge this year of hundreds of FTC posts, and the agency has not explained the deletions; Khan and an FTC spokesperson declined to comment. For the AI/ML community this matters because the posts framed regulatory thinking about open-source models, safety, and consumer harms. One key technical term championed by Khan’s staff—“open-weight”—refers to models whose trained weights are publicly released for inspection, modification, and reuse. Removing guidance (including pieces offering safety checklists like the award-winning “Luring Test”) creates uncertainty about enforcement expectations, record-keeping under the Federal Records Act, and the public archive of policy signals that shape model release practices. The deletions also coincide with a Trump administration AI agenda that publicly favors “open models,” suggesting a possible policy realignment at the FTC that could alter how open-source model development, testing, and consumer-protection obligations are balanced.