President Trump released an AI “action plan” on Wednesday that outlines the administration’s vision for achieving global dominance in artificial intelligence.
The report marks a split from Biden administration policies, which favored restrictions against exports of AI chips and steps to ensure AI was not used to spread misinformation.
However, the new rules do come with limitations for AI developers that build “ideological biases” into their systems, which have yet to be defined by the administration.
“There is a global competition now to lead in artificial intelligence, and we want the United States to win that race,” David Sacks, chair of the president’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, said during a briefing on the report.
Sacks said the report builds on President Trump’s executive order on AI issued during the first week of his second term in office by taking away “unnecessary barriers” to AI adoption put in place by the Biden administration.
Keys to the action plan include removing federal regulations that the administration believes hinder AI, promoting the build-out of AI data centers, and exporting US-made AI around the world.
More details of the plan are expected to come in an executive order or orders issued by the president on Wednesday afternoon.
Trump is also expected to discuss the plan during a speech at a Wednesday event titled “Winning the AI Race,” organized by White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks and his co-hosts on the “All-In” podcast.
Those executive orders, according to Axios and the Wall Street Journal, would promote the exports of chips and AI technology to countries considered friendly to the US.
There may also be an order targeting “woke AI,” according to the Wall Street Journal. It would target AI developers that the administration believes create liberally biased algorithms and block them from serving as federal contractors.
The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Asked who decides if an AI system is biased, a senior White House official said during a briefing that “what we’re recommending here is that federal procurement guidelines be updated to ensure that government only, the federal government only contracts with LLM developers who ensure that their systems are objective and free from top-down ideological bias. And you know, DEI is really the main one.”
Two constitutional law scholars who talked with Yahoo Finance said it is doubtful the “woke AI” measure will withstand legal scrutiny.
“If you sanction software that is liberal, but not software that is conservative, the challenge will be that the executive order is content-based discrimination,” said UC San Francisco School of Law professor Rory Little.
“I don’t even know how you tell if software is liberal or conservative,” Little said, adding that the First Amendment protects intellectual property as forms of speech that the government may not single out for punishment.
But the order’s constitutional viability may not matter in the short term for companies like Amazon (AMZN), Anthropic (ANTH.PVT), Google (GOOG), OpenAI (OPAI.PVT), Microsoft (MSFT), and Perplexity (PEAI.PVT), all of which are vying to supply AI systems to the government.
Even if the order is met with legal challenges, AI developers might not have time to wait out a court solution.
“A lot of people are trying to make deals with the Trump administration, so they view these executive orders not as law, but as the opening bid in a negotiation,” Little said.
“If you’re an AI company, like Google, you’re probably going to do your best to negotiate something that permits whatever you want to do to go forward,” he added. “And you could care less what atmospheric politics might look like, so long as you’re making money on your software.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Tuesday at a Federal Reserve banking conference in Washington, D.C., that his company now has lots of government work.
“We are increasingly working with the government to roll out our services to lots of government employees,” Altman said.
If such an AI order is issued and then challenged, a court fight is likely to resemble those in multiple ongoing lawsuits against two other DEI-focused executive orders issued by Trump during his first days back in office.
Those earlier orders directed all federal contractors to certify that they do not operate DEI programs in violation of anti-discrimination laws. They also shuttered government offices and employment positions focused on DEI.
David Coale, a partner with the law firm Lynn Pinker Hurst & Schwegmann, said the executive orders get into an area called the “unconstitutional conditions” doctrine, which prohibits the government from conditioning a grant on the exercise of constitutional rights.
“This [type of] proposal goes too far,” Coale said, explaining that tying the eligibility to an AI’s liberal bias presents “serious First Amendment issues.”
Alexis Keenan is a legal reporter for Yahoo Finance. Follow Alexis on X @alexiskweed.
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