As 2025 comes to a close, we’re taking the time to look back and analyze some of the most notable developments in tech policy. The following represents the technology and innovation team’s year in review.
2025 marked the transition from AI as a conversational novelty to Agentic AI as an emerging capability and potential economic force. A defining breakthrough was the “reasoning” models’ dominance, which moved beyond predicting text to AI agents that plan, self-correct, and execute multi-step workflows autonomously.
This occurred with substantial support for AI from the Trump administration. Early in the year, President Trump issued an executive order withdrawing former President Biden’s more cautious AI EO. Trump’s more deregulatory approach clears regulatory underbrush that will hasten building and powering AI data centers. The year ended with a sharp preemption push, with a December executive order calling for a national AI policy framework and pushing against state AI regulation that could frustrate the industry’s development.
The most acute regulatory risk for AI model providers clusters around mental health concerns, including documented cases linking intensive LLM interactions to suicide and self-harm, particularly among minors. These incidents have catalyzed rare bipartisan alignment alongside a wave of lawsuits blaming chatbots and interactive generative AI tools for deaths and injuries.
The mental health concerns surrounding AI echoed a broader pattern of technology platforms facing accountability for user wellbeing. In the social media world, platforms were blamed for multiple problems, with lawsuits piling up nationwide. The social media addiction cases consolidated in both federal multidistrict litigation and a state judicial council coordination proceeding moved forward, with bellwether trials slated for next year in both proceedings. The cases involve individual lawsuits, as well as claims filed by public school districts, local governments, and numerous state attorneys general.
The US Supreme Court’s June ruling in the online, age-verification case of Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton created a new workaround from strict scrutiny for content-based laws targeting adult websites. This workaround applies when states want to prevent minors from accessing sexually explicit speech that’s illegal for them, but lawful for adults. As Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority, intermediate scrutiny applies when “the First Amendment partially protects speech.” While the decision laudably helps shield minors from pornography, it’s “problematic because it requires adults to sacrifice their anonymity and personal information in exchange for accessing speech they have a First Amendment right to receive.”
Despite this litigation onslaught, social media companies have partially evaded Trump’s antitrust reign. The Biden-then-Trump DOJ sought to control how Google Search would be provided and restrict what businesses the parent company, Alphabet, could be in. The judge took a light-handed approach in the case’s remedy phase. Similarly with Meta, the Trump team stayed the course that Biden’s team paved, asking for Meta to be convicted of monopolization and potentially broken up. But this judge’s statement applied to both cases: If there ever was a monopoly problem, it was brief and is now long past.
In the telecommunications arena, perhaps the biggest story was the Supreme Court’s decision upholding the legality of the Universal Service Fund. The court rejected the challengers’ argument that the $8.5 billion program represented an unconstitutional delegation of authority from Congress to the Federal Communications Commission. But while the Universal Service Program dodged a bullet, the fund remains in financial crisis with a shrinking revenue base. Long-term stability will depend on Congress.
Another area of change involved the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program, which was overhauled to streamline broadband expansion and remove burdensome requirements by eliminating mandates favoring fiber over other technologies, reducing labor and environmental review rules, and rescinding earlier state awards to allow for faster bidding rounds. This is an improvement, but the administration is still too regulatory. If taxpayers are paying for BEAD, the states and the industry should be allowed to do their work.
The Trump administration’s deregulatory posture also extended into the cryptocurrency sector. Mutual admiration among the crypto community and President Trump produced a quick end to punitive enforcements and the crypto-skepticism among federal crypto regulators. Passage of the GENIUS Act in July created federal framework for “stablecoins,” crypto tokens that represent dollars and match them in value. President Trump made generous use of the pardon power for some crypto-industry figures and his family’s highly profitable crypto activities predict that the industry may be whipsawed when Democrats return to power.
With attention drawn elsewhere, 2025 was not a big year for federal privacy legislation. Perhaps in 2026, privacy will be recognized as a dimension of product quality that businesses should improve for consumer favor, rather than an issue to be taken off the table by regulators.
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