Trump's order to block 'woke' AI in government encourages tech giants to censor their chatbots

The Star

6 days ago

Tech companies looking to sell their artificial intelligence technology to the US federal government must now contend with a new regulatory hurdle: prove their chatbots aren't "woke.'
President Donald Trump's sweeping new plan to counter China in achieving "global dominance' in AI promises to cut regulations and cement American values into the AI tools increasingly used at work and home.
But one of Trump's three AI executive orders signed July 23 – the one "preventing woke AI in the federal government' – marks the first time the US government has explicitly tried to shape the ideological behavior of AI.
Several leading providers of the AI language models targeted by the order – products like Google's Gemini and Microsoft's Copilot – have so far been silent on Trump's anti-woke directive, which still faces a study period before it gets into official procurement rules.
While the tech industry has largely welcomed Trump's broader AI plans, the anti-woke order forces the industry to leap into a culture war battle – or try their best to quietly avoid it.
"It will have massive influence in the industry right now,' especially as tech companies are already capitulating to other Trump administration directives, said civil rights advocate Alejandra Montoya-Boyer, senior director of The Leadership Conference's Center for Civil Rights and Technology.
The move also pushes the tech industry to abandon years of work to combat the pervasive forms of racial and gender bias that studies and real-world examples have shown to be baked into AI systems.
"First off, there's no such thing as woke AI,' Montoya-Boyer said. "There's AI technology that discriminates and then there's AI technology that actually works for all people.'
Moulding the behaviours of AI large language models is challenging because of the way they're built and the inherent randomness of what they produce.
They've been trained on most of what's on the internet, reflecting the biases of all the people who've posted commentary, edited a Wikipedia entry or shared images online.
"This will be extremely difficult for tech companies to comply with,' said former Biden official Jim Secreto, who was deputy chief of staff to U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, an architect of many of Biden's AI industry initiatives. "Large language models reflect the data they're trained on, including all the contradictions and biases in human language.'
Tech workers also have a say in how they're designed, from the global workforce of annotators who check their responses to the Silicon Valley engineers who craft the instructions for how they interact with people.
Trump's order targets those "top-down' efforts at tech companies to incorporate what it calls the "destructive' ideology of diversity, equity and inclusion into AI models, including "concepts like critical race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, intersectionality, and systemic racism.'
For Secreto, the order resembles China's playbook in "using the power of the state to stamp out what it sees as disfavored viewpoints."
The method is different, with China relying on direct regulation through its Cyberspace Administration, which audits AI models, approves them before they are deployed and requires them to filter out banned content such as the bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy protests in 1989.
Trump's order doesn't call for any such filters, relying on tech companies to instead show that their technology is ideologically neutral by disclosing some of the internal policies that guide the chatbots.
"The Trump administration is taking a softer but still coercive route by using federal contracts as leverage,' Secreto said. "That creates strong pressure for companies to self-censor in order to stay in the government's good graces and keep the money flowing.'
The order's call for "truth-seeking' AI echoes the language of the president's one-time ally and adviser Elon Musk, who frequently uses that phrase as the mission for the Grok chatbot made by his company xAI.
But whether Grok or its rivals will be favored under the new policy remains to be seen.
Despite a "rhetorically pointed' introduction laying out the Trump administration's problems with DEI, the actual language of the order's directives shouldn't be hard for tech companies to comply with, said Neil Chilson, a Republican former chief technologist for the Federal Trade Commission.
"It doesn't even prohibit an ideological agenda,' just that any intentional methods to guide the model be disclosed, said Chilson, who is now head of AI policy at the nonprofit Abundance Institute. "Which is pretty light touch, frankly.'
Chilson disputes comparisons to China's cruder modes of AI censorship.
"There is nothing in this order that says that companies have to produce or cannot produce certain types of output,' he said. "It says developers shall not intentionally encode partisan or ideological judgments. That's the exact opposite of the Chinese requirement.'
So far, tech companies that have praised Trump's broader AI plans haven't said much about the order.
OpenAI on Thursday said it is awaiting more detailed guidance but believes its work to make ChatGPT objective already makes the technology consistent with what the order requires.
Microsoft, a major supplier of email, cloud computing and other online services to the federal government, declined to comment Thursday.
Musk's xAI, through spokesperson Katie Miller, a former Trump official, pointed to a company comment praising Trump's AI announcements as a "positive step' but didn't respond to a follow-up question about how Grok would be affected. xAI recently announced it was awarded a U.S. defense contract for up to US$200mil, just days after Grok publicly posted a barrage of antisemitic commentary that praised Adolf Hitler.
Anthropic, Google, Meta, and Palantir didn't immediately respond to emailed requests for comment Thursday.
AI tools are already widely used in the federal government, including AI platforms such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini for internal agency support to summarize the key points of a lengthy report.
The ideas behind the order have bubbled up for more than a year on the podcasts and social media feeds of Trump's top AI adviser David Sacks and other influential Silicon Valley venture capitalists, many of whom endorsed Trump's presidential campaign last year. Much of their ire centered on Google's February 2024 release of an AI image-generating tool that produced historically inaccurate images before the tech giant took down and fixed the product.
Google later explained that the errors – including one user's request for American Founding Fathers that generated portraits of Black, Asian and Native American men – were the result of an overcompensation for technology that, left to its own devices, was prone to favoring lighter-skinned people because of pervasive bias in the systems.
Trump allies alleged that Google engineers were hard-coding their own social agenda into the product, and made it a priority to do something about it.
"It's 100% intentional,' said prominent venture capitalist and Trump adviser Marc Andreessen on a podcast in December. "That's how you get Black George Washington at Google. There's override in the system that basically says, literally, 'Everybody has to be Black.' Boom. There's squads, large sets of people, at these companies who determine these policies and write them down and encode them into these systems.'
Sacks credited a conservative strategist who has fought DEI initiatives at colleges and workplaces for helping to draft the order.
"When they asked me how to define 'woke,' I said there's only one person to call: Chris Rufo. And now it's law: the federal government will not be buying WokeAI,' Sacks wrote on X.
Rufo responded that, in addition to helping define the phrase, he also helped "identify DEI ideologies within the operating constitutions of these systems.' – AP