Trump signs executive order to bar "woke" AI from federal dollars

Driving the news: Trump signed the executive order during an event hosted by the Hill & Valley Forum and the All-In podcast that featured Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and other big names.

• Earlier in the day, the White House unveiled its AI action plan.
• The executive order says the government can only procure "neutral" and "not biased" technology.

What they're saying: "The American people do not want woke Marxist lunacy in the AI models, and neither do other countries," Trump said.

• "I encourage all American companies to join us in rejecting poisonous Marxism in our technology."
• The EO states that "while the Federal Government should be hesitant to regulate the functionality of AI models in the private marketplace, in the context of Federal procurement, it has the obligation not to procure models that sacrifice truthfulness and accuracy to ideological agendas."

The EO states that the agency heads should only procure LLMs developed in what it calls "unbiased AI principles" of "truth-seeking" and "ideological neutrality."

• The EO defines truth-seeking as LLMs "that prioritize historical accuracy, scientific inquiry, and objectivity, and shall acknowledge uncertainty where reliable information is incomplete or contradictory."
• Ideological neutrality's definition states that LLMs "shall be neutral, nonpartisan tools that do not manipulate responses in favor of ideological dogmas such as DEI. Developers shall not intentionally encode partisan or ideological judgments into an LLM's outputs unless those judgments are prompted by or otherwise readily accessible to the end user."

The OMB director has 120 days to issue guidance to agencies to implement this EO.

• It allows for exceptions in the case of national security.

The executive order was designed by AI czar David Sacks and senior AI White House policy adviser Sriram Krishnan.

• Sacks on a Wednesday call with reporters said GSA will put together contractual language stating that LLMs procured by the federal government "would abide by a standard of truthfulness, of seeking accuracy and truthfulness, and not sacrificing those things due to ideological bias."
• The AI action plan recommended that federal procurement guidelines be updated to only allow contracts with LLM developers "who ensure that their systems are objective and free from top-down ideological bias."

• Sacks said that "really DEI is the main one."

Flashback: Trump during his first term signed an executive order requiring government agencies to review whether advertising and marketing dollars were being spent on platforms engaging in alleged censorship.

• In Trump's second term, companies like Meta and X have pushed for what they call free expression, getting rid of fact checkers and watering down content moderation policies.

The other side: "Demanding that developers refrain from 'ideological bias' or be 'neutral' in their models is an impossible, vague standard that the Administration will be able to weaponize for its own ideological ends," the Center for Democracy and Technology said.

• The Supreme Court has also ruled that the government can't use its spending authority to control contractors' speech outside the scope of the contract, CDT noted.

The intrigue: Companies with wide-ranging content moderation practices have so far secured Defense Department contracts.

• xAI, whose owner Elon Musk champions virtually no guardrails on online speech, recently secured up to a $200 million Department of Defense contract, as did Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI.

What we're watching: The Trump administration will have to balance its push to combat alleged ideological bias along with its goal of ensuring U.S. tech stays globally competitive.