Trump Signs AI EO to Reorient Federal Tech Approach

Editor’s Note: Since publishing, President Donald Trump signed a new executive order on Removing Barriers to American AI Innovation on Jan. 23. The article has been updated to include the directive.

President Donald Trump overturned former President Joe Biden’s AI executive order on Monday, signing a new executive order on Thursday that reorients government’s influence over AI development. The new order reverses policies, according to the text, that support developing AI with “ideological bias or engineered social agendas.”

In order to “sustain and enhance America’s AI dominance,” the order directs White House officials – including the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, the Special Advisor for AI and Crypto and the OMB director, among others – to develop an action plan to support AI that promotes “human flourishing, economic competitiveness and national security.” The action plans are due “within 180 days” of the order’s signing.

Trump’s AI strategy shift places a greater reliance on the tech industry to drive the development and implementation of AI practices, stating that Biden’s order created “unnecessarily burdensome requirements for companies developing and deploying AI that would stifle private sector innovation and threaten American technological leadership,” in a White House fact sheet.

On Tuesday, Trump endorsed a massive private sector AI infrastructure investment bringing together SoftBank, OpenAI and Oracle. The joint venture, called Stargate, will invest up to $500 billion in data centers and computing for AI. Trump touted the project as a job creator and “world-leading” effort.

“You’re going to hear a lot about it in the future, a new American company that will invest $500 billion in AI infrastructure in the United States and very quickly creating over 100,000 American jobs almost immediately,” Trump said at the Stargate event this week. “We have to get this stuff built.”

It is unclear how Stagate will work with the Biden administration’s most recent executive order on data centers, which was not among the orders that Trump repealed this week. Trump did, however, offer support for more public data center development for AI.

“I’d like to see federal lands opened up for data centers,” Trump said. “I think they’re going to be very important.”

Robin Feldman, the Arthur J. Goldberg Distinguished Professor of Law at the UC Law San Francisco, said that the Trump administration’s policy plans are still developing. There are opportunities for AI policy in health policy that may come, she said.

“The best way to fully understand the effects of the [Biden AI EO] repeal is to see what replaces it,” Feldman told GovCIO Media & Research. “If the president and the teams he puts into place follow up with innovative solutions, there may be opportunities for bipartisan support on broad initiatives in the current environment.”

Trump has supported AI’s evolution since his first term. He signed multiple AI executive orders and created programs like the American AI Initiative and the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Office to steer American public research into AI.

“Continued American leadership in artificial intelligence is of paramount importance to maintaining the economic and national security of the United States,” Trump said on signing the “Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence” order in 2019.

Federal agencies and institutions, like National Institutes of Standards and Technology, the AI Safety Institute, the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Homeland Security, drove AI governance, compliance and enforcement during the Biden administration via the executive order and other Biden White House initiatives.

The Trump administration’s recent actions contrast this strategy and underscore this reliance on industry self-regulation. Officials have emphasized the importance of collaboration with the private sector, citing the rapid pace of AI development and the need for agile responses.

“We have to have these industry partnerships. We have to have this collaboration piece,” said Tyson Brooks, technical director at the National Security Agency’s Artificial Intelligence Security Center, during GovCIO Media & Research’s AI Summit on Nov. 7.  “This is a very collaborative effort, because it’s going to be very challenging.”

Government officials cite AI governance as important to maintaining ethics and responsible development of the technology. Department of Labor Chief AI Officer Mangala Kuppa told GovCIO Media and Research that governance is important to building a solid foundation for AI development.

“Centralized governance is critical to ensure we use AI responsibly,” she said. “This includes identifying and mitigating risks, maintaining transparency, and embedding AI into our overall strategic framework.”

American AI leadership is critical to developing AI that aligns with American values and security, officials say. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity Director Rick Muller said that it is important that U.S. paces AI development.

“The U.S. needs to have this expertise here. We can’t outsource this to other places. We need to understand every step in AI, in both the logical and the economic supply chains, that go into building and sustaining AI tool sets. Then, we need to understand safety and security in all of its implications,” Muller said at the AI Summit last November.

Chinese officials promised to be the standard-bearer on AI. Trump said that the need to counter China’s AI development is an “emergency.”

“What we want to do is we want to keep [AI development] in this country. China is a competitor and others are competitors,” Trump said Tuesday. “We want it to be in this country, and we’re making it available. I’m going to help a lot through emergency declarations, because we have an emergency.”