As the approaching commander in chief commitments to reduce state legislation, President-elect Donald Trump‘s greatly anticipated artificial intelligence executive order may not be effective until after his inauguration next year.
With less than a week left in his presidency, Biden announced on Tuesday that he is instructing the Pentagon and the Department of Energy to rent specific parcels of provincial land in order to create new clear power facilities and AI data centers, arguing that AI infrastructure is a national security and economic imperative.
” We will not allow America to become out-built when it comes to the systems that will determine the prospect, nor may we compromise important environmental requirements and our shared efforts to protect fresh air and water,” Biden said in a statement. ” That is why today, I am signing an ancient Executive Order to accelerate the rate at which we build the next generation of Artificial network here in America, in a way that enhances economical profitability, national protection, AI safety, and fresh energy”.
In a separate statement, the White House stated that “domestic data centers for education and operating strong AI models may help the United States facilitate AI’s safe and secure growth, saddle AI in the support of national security, and stop adversaries from gaining access to effective systems to the detriment of our military and national security.” Additionally, it will help stop America from becoming dependent on different nations for strong AI resources.
Adam Conner, vice president for the Center for American Progress’s technology plan, praised debate regarding Biden’s AI administrative order, arguing Trump “is possible to promote the needs of AI-enamored tech companies at the expense of households and communities”.
Data centers are crucial to AI’s future, but the demand must be met by domestically-sourced, clean power, and the companies that use them, Conner told the Washington Examiner last month. The Biden administration should come out strong with its otherwise solid environmental and AI record.
The order is Biden’s latest executive action regarding AI, ranging from his Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, which he released in October 2022, to his first order in October 2023 concerning AI safety, transparency, and accountability and his October 2024 memorandum creating ethical standards for AI in national security. Earlier this week, Biden also announced new AI export controls, the Export Control Framework for AI Diffusion, to ensure China cannot access U. S. technology through third countries to advance its military.
Trump also pledged to “ban the use of AI to censor the speech of American citizens on day one” during the Republican presidential primary in 2024. Then the Republican Party embraced a policy platform during last year’s convention that describes Biden’s AI positions as “dangerous” because they, in part,” ]hinder ] AI Innovation and]impose ] radical leftwing ideas on the development of this technology”.
American Enterprise Institute AI and  senior fellow Shane Tews, a cybersecurity nonresident senior fellow at American Enterprise Institute, agreed that Biden’s” strict” AI safety executive action was particularly “overprescriptive,” adding that Trump did a good job of clearing the “underbrush” of technology regulations that do not “make any sense in the digital economy that we’re in right now.”
” Innovation needs some room to breathe”, Tews told the Washington Examiner. You must be able to identify the dark spots. You need several people to say, yes, before you just go diving into them. And that makes sense to me, but it doesn’t mean the government should be doing that, either.
In order to accomplish this, Trump did sign his own executive order, which was intended to strengthen critical infrastructure cybersecurity in 2017. Cybersecurity tends to be a bipartisan issue. However, Trump did not overstep into the technology sector during his first administration, instead encouraging private companies to self-regulate regarding cybersecurity and data privacy.
However, Musk, who is co-chair of the new Department of Government Efficiency, has been a vocal critic of AI’s unintended consequences, even co-signing an open letter in 2023 calling for a six-month moratorium on artificial general intelligence research to give it an opportunity for a careful, more thorough discussion of its ethical repercussions. Then last year, he , endorsed a controversial California bill to regulate AI.
Since last year’s election, Musk has pushed the boundaries of his new alliance with Trump, most recently last month with his support of , H-1B visas, the country’s largest visa category for , foreign specialty skilled workers. His backing of the program puts him in conflict with Trump’s MAGA base, which includes former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, who has stated in public that he wants to “run Muk out of here by Inauguration Day.”
” He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy. I made it my personal thing to take this guy down”, Bannon told , Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera last weekend.
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But Darrell West, a senior fellow at Brookings Institution’s Center for Technology Innovation, was not confident Trump will retain Biden’s AI executive action, notwithstanding Musk.
He leans toward a lighter side to regulation, and his staff has already complained that AI is being overly regulated, according to TechTank’s co-editor in chief. ” There shouldn’t be many divisions on the Republican side since most of those individuals prefer deregulation”.
