President Donald Trump signed executive orders on Wednesday targeting the development of artificial intelligence technology and data centers.
Presenting the first order on data center infrastructure, a Trump aide said, “This is a crucial issue affecting the entire AI industry. What this executive order will do is establish fast track permitting and ensure that the federal government is working to get data centers approved and through the permitting pipeline as quickly as possible.”
The next executive order centered on the export of American AI models, the aide explained, while the third ensures that “when the federal government procures or promotes different AI models, that those AI models are ideologically neutral, that they don’t embrace wokeism and critical race theory and all of these terrible theories that have done so much damage to our country.”
Last year, a leading AI model changed the ethnicities of historical figures in a push for diversity. Despite receiving appropriate prompts, the AI image generator failed to return accurate depictions of the Founding Fathers, those from the British Empire, and others.
Trump’s executive order alluded to the AI’s failure, stating that it was “trained to prioritize DEI requirements at the cost of accuracy.”
“Another AI model refused to produce images celebrating the achievements of white people, even while complying with the same request for people of other races,” the order explained. “In yet another case, an AI model asserted that a user should not ‘misgender’ another person even if necessary to stop a nuclear apocalypse.”
The orders follow the White House’s release of its “Winning the AI Race: America’s AI Action Plan.”
According to a government AI website linked to the White House’s announcement, the country with the “largest AI ecosystem will set the global standards and reap broad economic and security benefits” amid the race to “achieve global dominance in artificial intelligence.”
