The FTC is systematically removing hundreds of AI-related blog posts and guidance documents from its website, many from former chair Lina Khan’s tenure. This digital erasure under the returning Trump administration raises serious questions about transparency, policy continuity, and compliance with federal record-keeping laws.
In the shifting sands of Washington, where policy often bends with the political winds, a more unsettling phenomenon is taking hold: the silent disappearance of public record.
At the heart of this digital erasure is the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), an agency central to shaping the future of technology and consumer protection.
Under the watchful eye of the returning Trump administration, a growing number of blog posts, authored during the tenure of former chair Lina Khan and focusing on the critical issues of artificial intelligence, are vanishing from the internet without explanation.
This isn’t merely an administrative tidy-up; it’s a systematic scrubbing of institutional memory, raising profound questions about transparency, policy continuity, and the very integrity of government records.
Since President Trump’s return to the White House in January, the FTC has reportedly removed hundreds of blogs and business guidance documents from Khan’s period, with a significant purge of some 300 posts in March alone, covering AI, consumer protection, and even the agency’s landmark lawsuits against tech behemoths.
Among the most striking casualties are several detailed blog posts concerning AI.
One, titled “On Open-Weights Foundation Models,” published in July 2024, championed open-source AI and advocated for a less restrictive regulatory approach.
It was a nuanced piece, distinguishing between various forms of “open source” and proposing the term “open-weight” for models with publicly released training weights, thereby fostering innovation and competition among smaller players.
This post, once a clear signal of the FTC’s thinking, now redirects to a generic landing page for the agency’s Office of Technology.
The irony here is palpable: the Trump administration’s own AI Action Plan, released in July, explicitly calls for “leading open models founded on American values” and a “supportive environment for open models.”
Yet, a detailed argument for just that has been excised.
Douglas Farrar, a former FTC public affairs director, expressed his shock, noting the apparent disconnect between the current FTC’s actions and the White House’s stated position on open models.
Another significant deletion is the October 2023 post, “Consumers Are Voicing Concerns About AI,” which also now leads to the Office of Technology page.
More concerning still is the fate of “AI and the Risk of Consumer Harm,” published in January 2025 (likely a typo, intended as 2024), which highlighted the agency’s increasing alarm over AI’s potential for real-world harm—from incentivizing commercial surveillance to enabling fraud, impersonation, and illegal discrimination.
This crucial piece, detailing the very threats the FTC is tasked with mitigating, now simply returns a “Page not found” error.
It was live in mid-August but gone by the 15th.
The list of disappeared content goes on.
“The Luring Test: AI and the engineering of consumer trust,” an award-winning blog post offering guidance to tech companies on how to avoid building deceptive AI chatbots, was also removed in March.
Such a comprehensive erasure of guidance, insights, and warnings about the burgeoning field of AI leaves a void not just for the public, but for the industry itself, which relies on such communications for clarity and direction.
The silence from official channels is deafening.
An FTC spokesperson has not responded to requests for comment, and Lina Khan herself has declined to speak on the matter.
This lack of explanation only fuels speculation and deepens concerns, particularly given the legal obligations of government agencies.
An FTC source, speaking to WIRED in March, raised “serious compliance concerns” under the Federal Records Act and the Open Government Data Act, which mandate the preservation and public accessibility of government records with administrative, legal, or historical value.
The systematic removal of these posts, rather than, for instance, adding “warning” labels as the Biden administration did for previous administrations’ guidance it disagreed with, suggests a more deliberate and less transparent process.
Lina Khan’s tenure was marked by an aggressive stance on tech regulation, particularly in anticipating and addressing the societal impacts of AI.
Her speeches, like the one at Y Combinator where she positioned herself as an advocate for open-source AI, were often accompanied by detailed analyses from her staff, aiming to inform both the public and industry.
While more than 200 of Khan’s own statements and remarks remain on the FTC website, including those on enforcement actions against deceptive AI schemes and competition in generative AI, the removal of the more granular, policy-shaping blog posts is a stark indicator of a directional shift.
The implications of this digital disappearing act are far-reaching.
It undermines regulatory transparency, making it harder for the public, researchers, and companies to understand the evolution of policy thinking.
It raises questions about accountability, as critical analyses of AI’s risks and opportunities are quietly scrubbed from the official record.
And, perhaps most troubling, it suggests a willingness to erase history rather than engage in open debate, setting a dangerous precedent for how future administrations might handle the digital legacy of their predecessors.
As AI continues its rapid advance, the need for clear, consistent, and publicly accessible regulatory guidance has never been greater.
The FTC’s current approach, however, leaves us not with clarity, but with a growing void.
