Report from Bloomberg
In Brief – President Donald Trump revoked President Biden’s Executive Order on Artificial Intelligence as one of the 78 Biden Administration executive orders and memorandums included in his Inauguration Day Executive Order fully rescinding “Harmful Executive Orders and Actions” undertaken from January 21, 2021, to January 16, 2025. Biden’s major AI order was issued in October 2023, nearly a year after the release of chatbot phenom Chat-GPT that led to a dramatic increase in public and government discussion of AI risks and regulation, and was his Administration’s effort to use federal regulatory and contracting authority to promote AI safety and transparency practices as the EU was enacting its formal AI Act regulatory regime and it was increasingly clear that the US Congress was not likely to enact federal regulation of the wide-ranging but nascent technology. Some of the mandates, including a requirement that the largest AI developers share safety test results and other critical information on their most powerful AI systems with the federal government, faced opposition from some AI promoters and investors, and President Trump said he would repeal Biden’s executive order if he was elected. Trump has appointed David Sacks, a longtime critic of tech regulation, as his crypto-AI czar.
Context – The top initial AI priority of the Trump Administration will be promoting investment, including in data centers and related electrical generating capacity. In his final week in office, President Biden issued an executive order supporting the creation of AI data centers and generating capacity on federal lands. That order was not revoked by President Trump, who indicated he liked the idea. On his second day in office, Trump joined the CEOs of OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle to announce a major AI datacenter building project dubbed “Stargate” and billed as $500 billion over five years, with $100 billion available now. Elon Musk, a now-strident OpenAI critic who is heavily involved in AI development, said after the announcement that most of the project’s money was not in hand.