(Credit: Anna Moneymaker via Getty Images)
UPDATE 7/23: As part of an "AI Action Plan" unveiled this week, one of the executive orders does indeed target "woke AI in the federal government."
The EO essentially continues the Trump administration's campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and calls out Google for the historically inaccurate images its AI created last year. (No mention of Grok's MechaHitler tirade, Trump's AI-generated pope image posted on the official White House X feed, or the AI video Trump shared depicting President Obama getting arrested in the White House.)
The EO argues that the federal government "should be hesitant to regulate the functionality of AI models," but also says it should not allocate funds to "models that sacrifice truthfulness and accuracy to ideological agendas."
The EO says agency heads should only use large language models (LLMs) developed in accordance with two principles: truth-seeking and ideological neutrality. Trump is giving several agency heads—the director of the Office of Management and Budget, the Administrator for Federal Procurement Policy, the Administrator of General Services, and the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy—120 days to figure out how to assess that.
Original Story:
The Trump administration is reportedly planning a new executive order targeting chatbots that are "woke," a term co-opted by conservatives to describe left-leaning viewpoints.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the order comes in response to what administration officials see as a "liberal bias" in some AI models, and would mean that AI companies getting federal contracts would need to be "politically neutral and unbiased" in their models.
Many of the largest US AI firms have signed lucrative government contracts. Earlier this month, the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) awarded Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI with contracts worth up to $200 million "to accelerate Department of Defense (DoD) adoption of advanced AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges."
There is some internal pushback to the planned EO from AI Czar David Sacks and Sriram Krishnan, a senior White House policy adviser for AI, the Journal reports. However, the order is expected to land this week alongside several other measures aimed at improving US competitiveness in the AI race with China.
The White House has not publicly commented on the reports.
AI use has exploded in recent years, but it still struggles with hallucinations and is only as strong as the data on which it is trained. That's resulted in high-profile mistakes exploited by people on both sides of the political aisle, from Google's Gemini producing images of historically inaccurate figures to xAI's Grok expressing support for Nazis.
Shortly after taking office, President Trump rescinded a slew of Biden executive orders, including one intended to ensure safe, secure, and trustworthy AI. The Biden order acknowledged that AI presents both "promise and peril" for society, with the potential to "exacerbate societal harms such as fraud, discrimination, bias," disinformation, and other concerns.
Trump then hosted Oracle’s Larry Ellison, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at the White House to announce the launch of Stargate, a joint venture that plans to invest $500 billion over the next four years to develop AI data centers and generate electricity for AI across the US.