The expected federal investigations into leading artificial intelligence firms by two powerful agencies mark a sharp new turn in the Biden administration’s approach to AI — but the timing, deep in the fourth year of Biden’s presidency, could leave his antitrust agenda vulnerable if Donald Trump wins the presidency in November.

“Administrations are short and investigations are long,” said Daniel Francis, a former senior Federal Trade Commission official in the Trump administration, now a professor at NYU.

The FTC and the Department of Justice reached a tentative deal this week that gives the agencies clear separate lanes to tackle different sectors of the AI industry. The DOJ now has free rein to investigate chip giant Nvidia, while the FTC tackles the partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI.

The deal adds the prospect of real teeth to what has been, up to now, a cautious approach to AI regulation from both the White House and Congress. By focusing directly on companies, rather than the technology, antitrust investigations bring a new set of federal powers into force.

If the investigations turn into federal lawsuits, they’d become part of a broader Biden legacy of pushback on Big Tech through antitrust agencies — one that has caught the attention of regulators worldwide. By waiting so long to get started, however, the two agencies have most likely punted any enforcement decision into 2025, and a potential Trump presidency.

By November, any investigation would still be in the early stages. And a change in administration would almost certainly lead to the departure of DOJ antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter and FTC Chair Lina Khan, two of the most aggressive competition enforcers to lead either agency in at least a generation.

“It is quite hard to imagine that Trump would get somebody as proactive as Kanter or Khan into leadership,” said Florian Ederer, an economist at Boston University that specializes in competition policy.

Given how fast the AI industry is evolving, antitrust regulators could struggle to capture a coherent snapshot and act on it in time.

The FTC and DOJ did themselves no favors on the timing front by squabbling over “clearance” to pursue certain companies, people with knowledge of the negotiations said. This week’s agreement comes after nearly a year of talks on how to split jurisdiction over the young industry, according to people with knowledge of the discussions, during which AI companies continued to plow ahead.

The time-intensive process where agencies cut a deal to split their corporate targets “is a slightly odd feature of the two-agency model,” said Francis. “It generally works surprisingly well, but when you’re dealing with complex or fast-moving industries, then clearance delays can be least welcome — for everyone involved.”

An FTC spokesperson declined to comment on the impact of the clearance process, saying that the only “disadvantage enforcers have is the historic underfunding by Congress of the agency budgets” as they tackle the world’s richest companies. A DOJ spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Spokespeople for Nvidia and Microsoft declined to comment. An OpenAI spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

During the Trump administration, the FTC and DOJ took even longer to divvy up probes of Google, Apple, Meta and Amazon. But those regulators also reached a resolution with much more time before the election.

Still, the FTC and DOJ appear to be moving faster than many of their Washington counterparts when it comes to reining in the most powerful AI players. Much of that haste seems driven by the notion that antitrust regulators failed to move quickly when faced last decade with the rising market share of now-dominant tech platforms like Meta, Google and Amazon.

“Here this is not happening decades after, but it’s happening — not quite in real time, but certainly with a not as big of a delay as the decade delay we had with previous tech investigations,” Ederer said.

AI has helped elevate a new set of players to Washington’s attention, notably OpenAI and Nvidia — the maker of specialized AI microchips whose value briefly passed $3 trillion this week, and is now the world’s third-most valuable company behind Microsoft and Apple.

In a potential preview of the Republican approach to AI antitrust, right-of-center observers decried the expected competition probes. In a Thursday statement, Neil Chilson, who served as the FTC’s acting chief technologist during the Trump administration, called the AI marketplace “vibrant, dynamic and competitive.” He said antitrust regulators “might be better served focusing their resources and scrutiny on regulatory barriers to competition that are making consumers pay more for health care and housing.”

Alden Abbott, who served as FTC general counsel during the Trump administration, said that a Trump approach could pivot on whether Trump appoints conservative antitrust “populists,” who could continue their Democratic predecessors’ probes into the AI sector, or more traditionally business-friendly GOP regulators.

Abbott said that even populist Republicans may be uninterested in investigating market concentration in AI, given the technology’s weak connection to online censorship and other issues that have historically animated pro-Trump Republicans.

“This is a little bit different than going after Google or Facebook or Meta, if you think they’ve been involved in discriminating in political messaging,” Abbott said. “I think there’s bipartisan agreement that we want the U.S. to succeed in AI. It’s going to become very important as a matter of international competition.”

Now that the FTC and DOJ have divided up their AI targets, the next step will be the opening of official probes into Nvidia and the alliance between Microsoft and OpenAI. That will require the companies to respond to wide-ranging subpoenas seeking more information about their business practices and relationships with both partners and competitors. Many of those companies will also likely receive subpoenas as the agencies attempt to determine how, or whether, competition is being harmed in the AI sector.

Whatever happens in November, the expected competition probes into Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI puts companies across the AI sector on notice — Washington’s regulators are watching carefully, and sharpening their knives.

“AI is obviously a huge land grab right now,” said Rebecca Allensworth, an antitrust expert at Vanderbilt Law School. “And the fear is that the incumbents — the ones that already have a lot of market power — are going to find ways to solidify that market power by using AI. So it’s hugely important.”

Mohar Chatterjee contributed to this report.