Trump scraps Biden’s government order on AI; tech race with China accelerates
President Trump rescinded President Joseph R. Biden’s 2023 executive order on artificial intelligence, undoing government-imposed constraints on the emerging technology.
The decision to scrap Mr. Biden’s order on Monday won praise from industry and Mr. Trump’s fans, while America’s competitors are pressing ahead and a Chinese firm announced new gains in AI.
Bob Gourley, former Defense Intelligence Agency chief technology officer, applauded Mr. Trump’s move on Monday.
“And just like that, the EO the AI doomers & decels worked so hard to put in place has been rescinded,” Mr. Gourley posted on X. “We have lots of problems in AI today, most of which require an ability to innovate faster, so rescinding this is a great move.”
Mr. Biden’s sweeping AI executive order placed emphasis on government oversight of AI systems, with special attention to testing and evaluation mechanisms. Several federal departments were tasked with reviewing AI threats to infrastructure, new testing requirements were created, and the Commerce Department was charged with making content authentication guidance.
Critics of the order expressed concern that innovation would be smothered by regulatory red tape, while proponents of Mr. Biden’s AI agenda expressed alarm about the emerging technology’s danger and the need for safety.
The swing toward a more permissive tech development environment under Mr. Trump comes as China’s tech researchers are announcing new improvements.
As Mr. Trump took office on Monday, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek released its newest model it said was “on par” with American AI titan OpenAI’s tech. The company published a paper saying its first-generation reasoning models demonstrated “powerful and intriguing reasoning behaviors.”
Trump supporters who fear an ascendant China dominating the global technology industry favor the president’s actions on AI as positioning America to remain competitive.
The conservative Americans for Prosperity, which has recently drawn the political ire of Mr. Trump, cheered the president’s decision as a “decisive move toward empowering American innovation.”
“By ending this classic case of government overreach and refocusing on private-sector leadership, the administration reinforces its commitment to ensuring the U.S. remains a global technology leader while preserving the proper limits of presidential emergency powers,” the group posted on X.
Mr. Trump’s action to trash Mr. Biden’s AI order is the first of many policy decisions he will need to make on the key technology area in the months ahead.
One week before leaving office, the Biden administration rushed out an interim final rule on artificial intelligence diffusion that planned new controls for advanced AI chips and models with the goal of keeping the tech out of foreigners’ hands.
The rule specified compliance is required on May 15, according to the Federal Register, leaving Mr. Trump’s team a few months to determine how to address the Biden administration’s parting AI rulemaking.
