“We will repeal Joe Biden’s dangerous Executive Order that hinders AI innovation and imposes radical left-wing ideas on the development of this technology.”
Donald Trump is now set to be the next president of the United States, blowing the future of AI regulation in this country wide open.
That’s because Trump has promised to repeal the existing AI regulations implemented by outgoing President Joe Biden, which were arguably light to begin with. If Trump makes good on his promise, unchecked AI development may well be the order of the day.
“We will repeal Joe Biden’s dangerous Executive Order that hinders AI innovation and imposes radical left-wing ideas on the development of this technology,” Trump stated in his campaign platform. “In its place, Republicans support AI development rooted in free speech and human flourishing.”
Through an executive order, the Biden administration passed its existing AI regulations in October 2023 using a national defense act from 1950 as justification, meaning in the eyes of his opponents they were already on tenuous legal ground. That’s not really relevant now, though, since all Trump has to do is pass a counter-order to negate it.
The tech-bro-slash-accelerationist and conservative critique of the Biden AI order is mostly directed at two of its provisions, in Wired‘s analysis.
One lays out new requirements for how tech companies test and conduct risk assessments of their AI models, a practice known as “red-teaming.” Under the Biden provision, companies developing large AI models are required to share all red-team test results to the federal government for review, assessing for things like how vulnerable the AIs are to being hacked. Critics paint this process as needlessly slowing down the pace of AI development and forcing companies to disclose their trade secrets.
The other provision of note requires the National Institute of Standards and Technology to author guidance on, among other things, ensuring AI models are free of biases that could discriminate against certain groups based on factors like race or gender. That’s the part that Trump and his ilk see as imposing “radical left-wing ideas.”
It’s impossible to separate the conversation from Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and X-formerly-Twitter. He has criticized large AI models like ChatGPT for being “woke,” and launched his own AI startup and chatbot, a venture couched in the techno-optimist rhetoric of “understanding the universe.” Indeed, Musk sued OpenAI earlier this year purportedly for the “benefit of humanity,” because the now Microsoft-backed start up departed from its initial non-profit aims.
Those point to an ulterior motive. As a huge donor to the Trump campaign, for which he’s earned a spot in the incoming president’s inner circle, Musk stands to gain a whole lot from Trump’s relaxed regulations, which could allow his AI ventures to gain ground on his big tech competitors that had a years-long head start.
More broadly, it’s likely that Trump will oversee further deregulation of the tech industry at large, and especially cryptocurrency, which has become his latest dubious business venture after he flip-flopped from a vociferous critic to a major booster.
What this all means for big tech monopolies in particular is unclear, however. Several of the Federal Trade Commission’s biggest anti-trust suits against the likes of Google and Amazon were started during Trump’s first term in office, and were continued to be pursued during Biden’s.
Yet Trump has recently sounded more skeptical about the Biden-led Department of Justice attempts to break up Google’s enormous monopoly on search engines, as Reuters noted. Muddying the waters, his running mate and future vice president JD Vance is on the record as a supporter of the Biden FTC’s antitrust enforcement against big tech.
As to what Trump plans to replace Biden’s AI executive order with, that remains unclear. The platform doesn’t specify a detailed course of policy, beyond looser regulations and culture war signifiers.
But in all likelihood, expect the new administration to pursue a laissez-faire era of AI development — which, for a technology that its proponents have constantly insisted will soon be smart enough to rival humans and potentially destroy society as we know it, is more than a little concerning. Granted, those could be industry exaggerations, but there’s still plenty of mundane AI consequences to worry about, like widespread job destruction and voracious power consumption, which could be swept under the rug.
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