Trump Strikes a Blow Against “Woke AI”

The president has signed an executive order that will shape the future of artificial intelligence.

This week, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that effectively instructs his administration to refrain from purchasing “woke AI.” The order, issued just as artificial intelligence seems poised to dominate the technological future, creates powerful incentives for developers to produce unbiased AI models that serve the American interest.

I had an inside view of the order’s development and worked with administration officials, including AI czar David Sacks, to define the problem of artificial intelligence getting skewed ideologically. Since the 2020 George Floyd riots, the public has become familiar with the process of ideological capture: “woke” concepts, such as critical race theory, transgenderism, and DEI, proliferate within an institution, then degrade it. Trump and his administration understood these dynamics and prepared a suite of executive orders for the beginning of his term that eliminated Washington’s DEI bureaucracy and defunded government contracts that promote woke ideologies.

The ideological capture of software, however, is something new. The technology is experimental and rapidly changing—and it demands a novel response.

Enter Sacks, the famed venture capitalist and President Trump’s “AI and crypto czar.” Several weeks ago, Sacks reached out to me with a question: How can we define “woke AI,” and what principles can we enumerate to prevent the government from purchasing ideologically compromised software?

The answer begins with the fact that artificial intelligence companies deliberately select the values embedded in the code base, which chatbots use to formulate responses to users’ questions. For example, the AI company Anthropic published an official “constitution” that outlines the values it embeds in its software, including those embodied in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and in several concepts borrowed from critical race theory. Since the software’s responses are filtered through those values, Anthropic has what many consider the most left-wing-biased AI.

The choice of values is inevitable. All artificial intelligence companies have, explicitly or implicitly, baked an ideological formula into their “constitutions,” “system cards,” “alignment principles,” or “trust and safety rubrics.” The question is not whether an AI system will be built upon a set of values; the question is which set of values the programmers will select.

Trump’s executive order makes clear that while all AI companies are free to select any operating ideology, the federal government will purchase only software that is “truth-seeking” and committed to “ideological neutrality.” In other words, Washington will not do business with companies whose models will result in “the suppression or distortion of factual information about race or sex; manipulation of racial or sexual representation in model outputs; incorporation of concepts like critical race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, intersectionality, and systemic racism; and discrimination on the basis of race or sex.”

The theory behind the executive order is that Washington has an enormous influence over technology companies via contracting. The federal government is often the largest customer for big high-tech firms, and therefore, the government’s contracting requirements will profoundly influence the future of artificial intelligence, which could become a multitrillion-dollar industry.

The executive order arrives at an opportune moment. Artificial intelligence is in its infancy, and over the next four years, its developers will make crucial decisions about its future. What happens now will shape what lies ahead.

As AI continues to develop, the most contested fight will concern its “alignment.” Will developers align AI models with an ideological agenda, or with America’s national interest? It’s not a small question. Forecasters imagine a world in which virtually all human information is passed through artificial intelligence algorithms, and end-users—billions of people around the world—will have their perceptions shaped by this information. The competition between models, and between nations, will become intense.

With the executive order, Trump has staked clear ground: the U.S. government will support AI models that are factual, neutral, and aligned with America’s national interests. No doubt there will be more battles to come, but Trump, Sacks, and the White House’s entire artificial intelligence team deserve enormous credit. With the stroke of the president’s pen, they have shifted the direction of artificial intelligence away from woke—and toward a vibrant American future.