Trump rescinds Biden's executive order on AI safety in attempt to diverge from his predecessor
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Trump rescinds Biden's executive order on AI safety in attempt to diverge from his predecessor
Matt O'brien
6 min read
Hours after returning to the White House, President Donald Trump made a symbolic mark on the future of artificial intelligence by repealing former President Joe Biden’s guardrails for the fast-developing technology.
But what comes next from Trump and how it will diverge from how his predecessor sought to safeguard AI technology remains unclear. The new administration didn't respond to requests for comment about the repealed Biden policy and even some of Trump's most enthusiastic tech industry supporters aren't so sure.
“I think that the previous order had a lot in it,” said Alexandr Wang, the CEO of AI company Scale, describing Biden's 2023 executive order on AI as overly lengthy but declining to name what about it was harmful. “It’s hard to comment on each individual piece of it. There’s certainly some parts of it that we strongly agree with.”
Wang, who traveled to Washington to attend Trump's inaugural festivities, is also optimistic that better things are yet to come. He and other Silicon Valley leaders who previously worked with the Biden administration have embraced Trump and hope to guide his approach toward one with fewer restrictions.
In its early days, Trump's team has already "set the tone for a very productive administration with a lot of deep collaboration between industry and government," Wang said.
Not much left to repeal?
Much of Biden's 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. That work is done.
“The reports have been written and the recommendations generated, and they’re available for everyone to build on,” said Alexandra Reeve Givens, CEO of the nonprofit Center for Democracy & Technology. “The executive order's work is completed, whether or not it’s rescinded.”
Those reports are helping to inform the private sector as well as federal agencies and state governments, she said.
Not only that, but much of the standard-setting established by Biden's order followed the path of earlier AI executive orders signed by Trump in his first term that carried over into the Biden administration.
“If you look past the kind of political positioning on this, the Biden executive order built upon themes that were established in the first Trump administration and have been reiterated by bipartisan voices in Congress,” she said.
Regulating powerful AI
One key provision of Biden's AI order that was still in effect until 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.
In many ways, 2023 was a different time in the AI discourse. ChatGPT was a novelty and Elon Musk — long before he became a close adviser to Trump — had called for a moratorium on advanced AI development. Biden's own worries were amplified after watching the Tom Cruise film “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One” in which the world is threatened by a sentient and rogue machine, according to his then-deputy chief of staff.
The executive order followed public commitments to the Biden administration from tech companies including Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI welcoming third-party oversight.
But the order went further in invoking the Defense Production Act, which dates from the Korean War, to compel companies to share safety test results and other information if their AI systems met a certain threshold.
Little is known publicly about how those confidential exchanges worked in practice, but the government scrutiny was heavily criticized last year by some Trump backers such as the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who also sits on the board of Facebook parent Meta Platforms.
Andreessen said over the summer that he was concerned with “the idea that we’re going to deliberately hamstring ourselves through onerous regulations while the rest of the world lights up on this, and while China lights up on this.”
Ideological differences on AI
Trump is following through with a campaign promise to rescind Biden’s AI order. His campaign platform described it as hindering AI innovation and imposing “Radical Leftwing ideas on the development of this technology,” tying it to broader concerns from Musk and other Trump allies about ”woke AI" chatbots reflecting liberal biases.
But the Biden order itself didn't restrict free speech. Some provisions sought standards for the watermarking of AI-generated content, part of a strategy to reduce the dangers of impersonation and abusive sexual deepfake imagery. The order also directed multiple federal agencies to guard against potential harms of AI applications, warning against irresponsible uses that “reproduced and intensified existing inequities, caused new types of harmful discrimination, and exacerbated online and physical harms.”
One former White House science adviser who helped craft Biden's rights-based AI approach described Trump's action as a “politically motivated repeal with no thoughtful replacement."
Trump's move signals that he is “less supportive than the Biden administration of issues around privacy, around people’s civil liberties and civil rights and just concerns around safety more broadly with regards to advanced systems,” said Alondra Nelson, the former acting director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Addressing those concerns is important for people to adopt the AI tools that businesses are developing, added Nelson, now a fellow at the Center for American Progress.
“Americans have some of the highest rates of mistrust of AI in the developed world,” she said, citing surveys.
Pivot to AI common ground
Some of Biden's AI moves are still in place, at least for now, such as a year-old AI Safety Institute focused on national security. Trump also hasn't yet weighed in on Biden's bigger conflict with the tech industry — pending rules restricting AI chip exports to more than 100 countries in an effort to counter China's backdoor access to them in places such as the Persian Gulf and Southeast Asia.
Nor has Trump repealed Biden's most recent AI executive order — a week-old action that seeks to remove hurdles for AI data center expansion in the U.S. while also encouraging those data centers to be powered with renewable energy.
Trump on Tuesday talked up a joint venture investing up to $500 billion for AI data centers and electricity infrastructure to power them, through a new partnership called Stargate formed by ChatGPT maker OpenAI along with Oracle and SoftBank. At a press conference, he didn't seem familiar with Biden's latest AI order but said he wouldn't rescind it.
“That sounds to me like it’s something that I would like,” Trump said. “I’d like to see federal lands opened up for data centers. I think they’re going to be very important.”
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AP writer Joshua Boak in Washington contributed to this report.
