Trump to AI Companies: Want Federal Funds? Your Chatbot Can’t Be ‘Woke’

The Trump administration is reportedly planning a new executive order targeting chatbots that are “woke,” a term co-opted by conservatives to describe left-leaning viewpoints.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the order comes in response to what administration officials see as a “liberal bias” in some AI models, and would mean that AI companies getting federal contracts would need to be “politically neutral and unbiased” in their models.

Many of the largest US AI firms have signed lucrative government contracts. Earlier this month, the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) awarded Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI with contracts worth up to $200 million “to accelerate Department of Defense (DoD) adoption of advanced AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges.”

There is some internal pushback to the planned EO from AI Czar David Sacks and Sriram Krishnan, a senior White House policy adviser for AI, the Journal reports. However, the order is expected to land this week alongside several other measures aimed at improving US competitiveness in the AI race with China.

The White House has not publicly commented on the reports.

AI use has exploded in recent years, but it still struggles with hallucinations and is only as strong as the data on which it is trained. That’s resulted in high-profile mistakes exploited by people on both sides of the political aisle, from Google’s Gemini producing images of historically inaccurate figures to xAI’s Grok expressing support for Nazis.

Shortly after taking office, President Trump rescinded a slew of Biden executive orders, including one intended to ensure safe, secure, and trustworthy AI. The Biden order acknowledged that AI presents both “promise and peril” for society, with the potential to “exacerbate societal harms such as fraud, discrimination, bias,” disinformation, and other concerns.

Trump then hosted Oracle’s Larry Ellison, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at the White House to announce the launch of Stargate, a joint venture that plans to invest $500 billion over the next four years to develop AI data centers and generate electricity for AI across the US.

Get Our Best Stories!

Your Daily Dose of Our Top Tech News

Sign up for our What’s New Now newsletter to receive the latest news, best new products, and expert advice from the editors of PCMag.

Sign up for our What’s New Now newsletter to receive the latest news, best new products, and expert advice from the editors of PCMag.

By clicking Sign Me Up, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

Thanks for signing up!

Your subscription has been confirmed. Keep an eye on your inbox!

About Will McCurdy

Contributor

I’m a reporter covering weekend news. Before joining PCMag in 2024, I picked up bylines in BBC News, The Guardian, The Times of London, The Daily Beast, Vice, Slate, Fast Company, The Evening Standard, The i, TechRadar, and Decrypt Media.

I’ve been a PC gamer since you had to install games from multiple CD-ROMs by hand. As a reporter, I’m passionate about the intersection of tech and human lives. I’ve covered everything from crypto scandals to the art world, as well as conspiracy theories, UK politics, and Russia and foreign affairs.

Read Will’s full bio

Read the latest from Will McCurdy