The US Federal Trade Commission’s public record on artificial intelligence is changing. Several AI-related blog posts published during Lina Khan’s tenure have either been redirected or removed, according to WIRED’s reporting and archived pages described in the source article.
The affected posts covered open-weight foundation models, consumer concerns about AI, and the risk of consumer harm. Their disappearance matters because the FTC is described in the source as a key AI market regulator, and public guidance can shape how companies understand the agency’s priorities.
What disappeared from the FTC website
One removed post was titled “On Open-Weights Foundation Models.” It was published on July 10, 2024, in the days before Khan spoke at an event hosted by the San Francisco startup accelerator Y Combinator.
At that event in late July 2024, Khan positioned herself as an advocate for open source artificial intelligence. The timing was significant because California lawmakers were considering SB 1047, a landmark bill that would have imposed new testing and safety requirements on AI companies. The legislation was later vetoed by California governor Gavin Newsom.
Critics of SB 1047 argued that it would slow the development and release of open source AI models. Khan called for a less restrictive approach and said that, with open models available to them, “smaller players can bring their ideas to market.”
The FTC blog post made a related point about terminology. It noted that “open source” had been used to describe AI models with different characteristics. The authors suggested using “open-weight” for a model whose training weights are released publicly, allowing anyone to inspect, modify, or reuse it.
According to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, that post was redirected on September 1 of this year to a landing page for the FTC’s Office of Technology.
Consumer harm guidance was also affected
A second FTC post, published in October 2023 and titled “Consumers Are Voicing Concerns About AI,” now also redirects to the Office of Technology landing page. The source article says that the Wayback Machine shows the redirect occurred in late August of this year.
A third post, titled “AI and the Risk of Consumer Harm,” was published on January 3, 2025, and authored by Khan’s staff. It now leads to an error screen saying “Page not found.”
The archived timeline in the source is narrow. The post was still live on the FTC website as of August 12, but by August 15 it had been removed from the internet.
In that original post, Khan’s staff wrote that the agency was “increasingly taking note of AI’s potential for real-world instances of harm—from incentivizing commercial surveillance to enabling fraud and impersonation to perpetuating illegal discrimination.”
Together, the three examples show that the affected material was not limited to one narrow topic. The removed or redirected posts touched both the competitive implications of open models and the consumer protection risks the agency associated with AI systems.
The policy signal is unclear
The reason for the removals is not clear from the source article. An FTC spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. Khan, through a spokesperson, declined to comment.
Former FTC public affairs director Douglas Farrar told WIRED he was especially surprised that the open weights blog was removed. He pointed to the FTC’s role as a key AI market regulator and said, “I was shocked to see the Ferguson FTC be so out of line with the Trump White House on this signal to the market,” referring to newly appointed FTC chair Andrew Ferguson.
That reaction reflects a tension described in the source. The Trump administration’s AI Action Plan from July argues that “we need to ensure America has leading open models founded on American values” and that “the Federal government should create a supportive environment for open models.”
The FTC did not respond to questions about whether the deletions represent a shift in policy. Several Trump administration technology advisers, including David Sacks, special adviser to the White House on AI and crypto, and Sriram Krishnan, a senior policy adviser to the White House on AI, have also advocated for open source AI. They have framed it as important to US technological dominance.
A broader rollback of tech guidance
The AI posts are part of a wider pattern described in the source article. Since President Trump returned to the White House in January, the FTC has removed hundreds of blogs and business guidance for the tech industry published during Khan’s tenure, WIRED previously reported.
In March, the FTC removed some 300 posts related to AI, consumer protection, and lawsuits against tech giants like Amazon and Microsoft. One of those posts, titled “The Luring Test: AI and the engineering of consumer trust,” gave guidance to tech companies on avoiding deceptive AI chatbots.
That post had won an award from the Aspen Institute in 2023 for its accessible descriptions of artificial intelligence.
An FTC source told WIRED in March that removing public blog posts “raises serious compliance concerns under the Federal Records Act and the Open Government Data Act.” The source article describes those laws as requiring government agencies to preserve records with administrative, legal, or historical value and make them accessible to the public.
The source also notes a different approach used during the Biden administration. FTC leadership then placed “warning” labels on business directives and other guidance from earlier administrations that it disagreed with.
What remains online
The removals do not mean all Khan-era AI material has disappeared from the FTC website. More than 200 posts and statements authored by Khan herself were still available at the time of publication.
Those remaining materials include a September 2024 blog on enforcement actions the agency took against allegedly deceptive AI schemes, a 2024 joint statement from the FTC and other groups on competition in the market for generative AI foundation models, and remarks from a 2023 roundtable on generative AI.
In those remarks, Khan said the agency was “looking closely at how AI can turbocharge fraud” and “entrench the dominance of the firms that control necessary raw inputs,” among other harms.
For companies, researchers, and the public, the practical issue is not only whether a specific blog post remains easy to find. It is whether the FTC’s public-facing AI guidance continues to show a stable record of how the agency has discussed open models, consumer protection, deceptive AI chatbots, and market power.