President Donald Trump signed an executive order on artificial intelligence Thursday that will revoke past government policies his order says “act as barriers to American AI innovation.”
To maintain global leadership in AI technology, “we must develop AI systems that are free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas,” Trump’s order says.
The new order doesn’t name which existing policies are hindering AI development but sets out to track down and review “all policies, directives, regulations, orders, and other actions taken” as a result of former President Joe Biden’s sweeping AI executive order of 2023, which Trump rescinded Monday. Any of those Biden-era actions must be suspended if they don’t fit Trump’s new directive that AI should “promote human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security.”
Last year, the Biden administration issued a policy directive that said U.S. federal agencies must show their artificial intelligence tools aren’t harming the public, or stop using them. Trump’s order directs the White House to revise and reissue those directives, which affect how agencies acquire AI tools and use them.
Biden’s executive order, the Trump administration said, “established unnecessarily burdensome requirements for companies developing and deploying AI that would stifle private sector innovation and threaten American technological leadership.”
Trump’s order also calls for the development of an AI action plan within 180 days. Leading the work will be a small group of White House tech and science officials, including a new Special Advisor for AI and Crypto — a role Trump has given to venture capitalist and former PayPal executive David Sacks.
Trump repealed Biden’s 2023 guardrails for fast-developing AI technology just hours after returning to the White House on Monday.
The new actions threaten to erase some of the Biden administration’s efforts — championed by then-Vice President Kamala Harris — to curb government use of the kinds of AI tools that have been found to amplify gender or racial bias, from medical diagnosis chatbots spouting false information to face recognition technology tied to wrongful arrests of Black men.
Until Thursday, it wasn’t clear if Trump planned to replace Biden’s signature AI policy with his own order. Trump had also signed executive orders on AI in his previous term, including a 2019 order directing federal agencies to prioritise research and development in AI that is still on the books.
Alondra Nelson, former acting director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under Biden, said Trump’s order seemed “backward looking” because agencies would be tasked with reviewing initiatives “that are already helping people, with an implicit intent to unwind them.”
The Biden administration’s AI policies, she added, were aimed at protecting both innovation and the public.
“In 60 days, we’ll know which Americans’ rights and safety the Trump Administration believes deserves to be protected in the age of AI, and if there will be a level playing field for every technologist, developer, and innovator or just the tech billionaires,” Nelson said.
Much of Biden’s 2023 order set in motion a sprint across government agencies to study’s AI impact on everything from cybersecurity risks to its effects on education, workplaces and public benefits, with an eye on ensuring AI tools weren’t harming people. That work is largely done.
One major piece that remained — until Trump rescinded it Monday — was a requirement that tech companies building the most powerful AI models share details with the government about the workings of those systems before they are unleashed to the public.
The Trump order’s focus on “human flourishing” echoes the language of his campaign’s long-held promise to cancel Biden’s AI policy once back in the White House. It’s also in line with ideas espoused by Trump adviser Elon Musk, who has warned against the dangers of what he calls “woke AI” that reflects liberal biases.
In a statement, Americans for Responsible Innovation, a nonprofit organisation, said Trump has “made it clear from day one that his top priority on AI is out-innovating the rest of the world.”
“Today’s executive order is a placeholder until the administration has a chance to develop a full strategy for executing that vision,” said the organisation’s executive director, Eric Gastfriend.
Agencies had already frozen work on AI policies initiated by the last administration following Trump’s repeal of Biden’s executive order on Monday, Gastfriend said.
“This new instruction shouldn’t come as a surprise,” he said.