Hours after returning to the White Housethe president donald trump left a symbolic mark on the future of the artificial intelligence (IA) by repealing protection measures for rapidly developing technology established by the former president Joe Biden.
However, what Trump will do next and how it will differ from the way his predecessor sought to protect AI technology remains unclear. The new administration did not respond to requests for comment on the repealed Biden policy, and even some of Trump’s most ardent supporters in the tech industry are unsure.
“I think the previous order had a lot of content”said Alexandr Wang, CEO of AI company Scale, describing Biden’s 2023 executive order on AI as overly broad but without specifying what was harmful. “It’s hard to comment on every single part of it. “There are definitely parts that we completely agree with.”
Wang, who traveled to Washington to attend Trump’s inaugural festivities, is also optimistic that better things are to come. He and other Silicon Valley leaders who 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 already “has set the tone for a very productive administration with a lot of deep collaboration between industry and government,” Wang said.
Is there much left to repeal?
Much of Biden’s order launched a race among government agencies to study the impact of AI 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 are available for everyone to take advantage of,” said Alexandra Reeve Givens, CEO of the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology. “The work of the executive order is complete, whether it has been rescinded or not.”
Those reports are helping to inform both the private sector and federal agencies and state governments, she said.
Not only that, but much of the regulation laid out by Biden’s order followed the path of previous executive orders on AI signed by Trump in his first term that carried over to the Biden administration.
1/50 | In pictures: this is how the day of Donald Trump’s second inauguration went. President-elect Donald Trump arrived at his inaugural mass as he began inauguration activities for his second term as president of the United States. -Matt Rourke
“If you look beyond the political positioning on this, Biden’s executive order was based on themes that were established in the first Trump administration and have been reiterated by bipartisan voices in Congress,” she said.
Regulating powerful artificial intelligence
A key provision of Biden’s order that was still in effect as of Monday was a requirement that tech companies that build the most powerful AI models share details with the government about how those systems work before they are released to the public. .
In many ways, 2023 was a different time in AI discourse. ChatGPT It was a novelty and Elon Musk — long before becoming a Trump adviser — had called for a moratorium on the advanced development of artificial intelligence. Biden’s concerns were amplified after watching the Tom Cruise movie “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One” in which the world is threatened by a rogue, sentient 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 by invoking the Defense Production Act, which dates back to the Korean War, to force companies to share security test results and other information about whether their AI systems met a certain threshold.
Little is publicly known about how those confidential exchanges worked in practice, but government scrutiny was heavily criticized last year by some Trump supporters such as venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who also sits on the board of parent company Meta Platforms. from Facebook.
Andreessen said over the summer that he was concerned about “the idea that we are going to deliberately incapacitate ourselves through onerous regulations while the rest of the world lights up about this, and while China lights up about this.”
Ideological differences over AI
Trump is making good on a campaign promise to rescind Biden’s AI order. His campaign platform described it as an impediment to innovation and imposing “radical leftist ideas on the development of this technology.”tying it to broader concerns from Musk and other Trump allies about “woke” AI chatbots that reflect liberal biases.
But Biden’s order itself did not restrict free speech. Some provisions sought standards for watermarking AI-generated content, part of a strategy to reduce the dangers of spoofing and sexually abusive deepfake images. lThe order also directed multiple federal agencies to protect against potential harm from AI applications, warning against irresponsible uses that “reproduce and intensify existing inequities, cause new types of harmful discrimination, and exacerbate online and physical harms.”
A former White House science adviser who helped craft Biden’s rights-based approach to AI described Trump’s action as a “politically motivated repeal without thoughtful replacement.”
Trump’s action signals that he is “less supportive than the Biden administration of issues related to privacy, individual civil liberties and civil rights, and simply security concerns more broadly with respect 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 companies are developing, added Nelson, now a fellow at the Center for American Progress.
“Americans have some of the highest rates of distrust of AI in the developed world,” he said, citing surveys.
Pivot towards common ground
Some Biden actions on artificial intelligence are still in place, at least for now, such as a year-old AI Security Institute focused on national security. Trump has not yet commented on Biden’s biggest conflict with the technology industry: Pending rules restricting exports of AI chips to more than 100 countries in an effort to counter China’s backdoor access to them in places like the Persian Gulf and Southeast Asia.
He also has not repealed Biden’s most recent executive order, a week-old action that seeks to remove obstacles to the expansion of AI data centers in the United States while also encouraging those data centers to be powered by renewable energy.
Trump on Tuesday talked about a joint venture that will invest up to $500 billion for AI data centers and the electrical infrastructure to power them, through a new partnership called Stargate formed by ChatGPT maker OpenAI along with Oracle and SoftBank. At a news conference, he seemed unfamiliar with Biden’s latest AI order but said he would not repeal it.
“That sounds like something I would like,” Trump said. “I would like to see federal lands open for data centers. I think they are going to be very important.”