Trump axes Biden’s AI executive order
![US President Donald Trump signs executive orders in the Oval Office of the WHite House in Washington, DC, on January 20, 2025.](https://cdn.nextgov.com/media/img/cd/2025/01/20/012025TrumporderNG/860x394.jpg?1737421559)
US President Donald Trump signs executive orders in the Oval Office of the WHite House in Washington, DC, on January 20, 2025. JIM WATSON/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
President Donald Trump vowed to repeal the order during campaigning and in his presidential platform.
President Donald Trump rolled back former President Joe Biden’s executive order focused on artificial intelligence just hours after being inaugurated.
It’s just one of nearly 80 Biden-era executive actions Trump wiped away with his own, new executive order on Monday.
Trump’s move to kill Biden’s sweeping AI order is not unexpected. The 2024 Republican platform called the order “dangerous” and said that it “imposes radical leftwing ideas on the development of this technology.”
The tech-focused order did have some controversial aspects, like requiring developers to share details about potentially risky models with the government by invoking the Defense Production Act.
It also set out guardrails for how the federal government uses AI.
New research from Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence found progress in agencies’ implementation of governance requirements as compared to the spotty rollout of previous executive orders from the Trump administration, which the Biden White House kept on the books.
Since Biden penned the executive order in the fall of 2023, agencies have tapped chief AI officers and issued compliance plans around their use of AI.
It is not yet clear how and when Trump will replace Biden’s policies for the technology, but former Biden officials have worried about a lack of guidance for agencies.
“The OMB memo was laying out those guardrails,” Suresh Venkatasubramanian, director of the Center for Technological Responsibility, Reimagination and Redesign at Brown University and former official in Biden’s White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, previously told Nextgov/FCW. “If it is taken down, we will have no protections at all.”