Biden unveils U.S. government’s first-ever AI executive order
President Joe Biden speaks as he meets with AI experts and researchers at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, Calif., on Tuesday, June 20, 2023.
Jane Tyska | Medianews Group | Getty Images
President Joe Biden unveiled a new executive order on artificial intelligence — the U.S. government’s first action of its kind — requiring new safety assessments, equity and civil rights guidance and research on AI’s impact on the labor market.
While law enforcement agencies have warned that they’re ready to apply existing law to abuses of AI and Congress has endeavored to learn more about the technology to craft new laws, the executive order could have a more immediate impact. Like all executive orders, it “has the force of law,” according to a senior administration official who spoke with reporters on a call Sunday.
The White House breaks the key components of the executive order into eight parts:
- Creating new safety and security standards for AI, including by requiring some AI companies to share safety test results with the federal government, directing the Commerce Department to create guidance for AI watermarking, and creating a cybersecurity program that can make AI tools that help identify flaws in critical software.
- Protecting consumer privacy, including by creating guidelines that agencies can use to evaluate privacy techniques used in AI.
- Advancing equity and civil rights by providing guidance to landlords and federal contractors to help avoid AI algorithms furthering discrimination and creating best practices on the appropriate role of AI in the justice system, including when it’s used in sentencing, risk assessments and crime forecasting.
- Protecting consumers overall by directing the Department of Health and Human Services to create a program to evaluate potentially harmful AI-related healthcare practices and creating resources on how educators can responsibly use AI tools.
- Supporting workers by producing a report on the potential labor market implications of AI and studying the ways the federal government could support workers impacted by a disruption to the labor market.
- Promoting innovation and competition by expanding grants for AI research in areas like climate change and modernizing the criteria for highly skilled immigrant workers with key expertise to stay in the U.S.
- Working with international partners to implement AI standards around the world.
- Developing guidance for federal agencies’ use and procurement of AI and speed up the government’s hiring of workers skilled in the field.
The order represents “the strongest set of actions any government in the world has ever taken on AI safety, security, and trust,” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Bruce Reed said in a statement.
It builds on voluntary commitments the White House previously secured from leading AI companies and represents the first major binding government action on the technology. It also comes ahead of the an AI safety summit hosted by the U.K..
The senior administration official referenced the fact that 15 major American technology companies have agreed to implement voluntary AI safety commitments, but that it “is not enough,” and Monday’s executive order is a step towards concrete regulation for the technology’s development.
“The President, several months ago, directed his team to pull every lever, and that’s what this order does: bringing the power of the federal government to bear in a wide range of areas to manage AI’s risk and harness its benefits,” the official said.
President Biden’s executive order requires that large companies share safety test results with the U.S. government before the official release of AI systems. It also prioritizes the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s development of standards for AI “red-teaming,” or stress-testing the defenses and potential problems within systems. The Department of Commerce will develop standards for watermarking AI-generated content.
The order also involves training data for large AI systems, and it lays out the need to evaluate how agencies collect and use commercially available data, including data purchased from data brokers, especially when that data involves personal identifiers.
The Biden administration is also taking steps to beef up the AI workforce. Beginning Monday, the senior administration official said, workers with AI expertise can find relevant openings in the federal government on AI.gov.
As far as a timeframe for the actions dictated by the executive order, the administration official said Sunday that the “most aggressive” timing for some safety and security aspects of the order involves a 90-day turnaround, and for some other aspects, that timeframe could be closer to a year.
Building on earlier AI actions
Monday’s executive order follows a number of steps the White House has taken in recent months to create spaces to discuss the pace of AI development, as well as proposed guidelines.
Since the viral rollout of ChatGPT in November 2022 — which within two months became the fastest-growing consumer application in history, according to a UBS study — the widespread adoption of generative AI has already led to public concerns, legal battles and lawmaker questions. For instance, days after Microsoft folded ChatGPT into its Bing search engine, it was criticized for toxic speech, and popular AI image generators have come under fire for racial bias and propagating stereotypes.
President Biden’s executive order directs the Department of Justice, as well as other federal offices, to develop standards for “investigating and prosecuting civil rights violations related to AI,” the administration official said Sunday on the call with reporters.
“The President’s executive order requires a clear guidance must be provided to landlords, federal benefits programs and federal contractors to keep AI algorithms from being used to exacerbate discrimination,” the official added.
In August, the White House challenged thousands of hackers and security researchers to outsmart top generative AI models from the field’s leaders, including OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Nvidia. The competition ran as part of DEF CON, the world’s largest hacking conference.
“It is accurate to call this the first-ever public assessment of multiple LLMs,” a representative for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy told CNBC at the time.
The competition followed a July meeting between the White House and seven top AI companies, including Alphabet, Microsoft, OpenAI, Amazon, Anthropic, Inflection and Meta. Each of the companies left the meeting having agreed to a set of voluntary commitments in developing AI, including allowing independent experts to assess tools before public debut, researching societal risks related to AI and allowing third parties to test for system vulnerabilities, such as in the August DEF CON competition.
WATCH: How A.I. could impact jobs of outsourced coders in India
Jakub Porzycki | Nurphoto | Getty Images
A week-long rout in Bitcoin worsened Friday, with the digital asset hitting an over 3-month low, reversing gains that followed the election of U.S. President Donald Trump.
Bitcoin was trading at about $80,500 in early trading in Asia, down 3.45% on the day and nearly 25% lower than an all-time high hit in mid December.
Bitcoin had enjoyed a surge in prices following Trump’s victory in November, with the leader having posed himself as a pro-crypto candidate during his campaign.
However, prices have slipped as investors shun assets perceived to be risky given the weakness in global equity markets, uncertainty surrounding the new President’s tariff policy and resolutions to major wars such as Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Gaza.
Investor sentiment was also soured by news that Bybit, a major cryptocurrency exchange, suffered a $1.5 billion hack in what’s estimated to be the largest crypto heist in history.
“It seems that the market has become volatile in reaction to the Bybit incident,” Jeff Mei, chief operating officer at crypto exchange BTSE said in a statement sent to CNBC, adding that inflation concerns and a pause in Fed rate cuts in the U.S. have also suppressed markets.
Still, some crypto bulls remain positive on Bitcoin’s outlook as they await key regulatory developments from the Trump administration.
Already, Trump has signed an executive order promoting the advancement of cryptocurrencies in the U.S. and developing a national digital asset stockpile. Meanwhile, his administration has created task forces and a “crypto czar” tasked with supporting a clear regulatory framework for crypto assets.
Geoffrey Kendrick, head of digital assets research at Standard Chartered, said in an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Thursday that bitcoin could surpass the $200,000 threshold this year.
Increased crypto adoption by institutions along with some “regulatory clarity” in the U.S., should lead to less volatility over time, he said.
—CNBC’s Ryan Browne contributed to this report
Technology
House Judiciary Committee subpoenas Alphabet, Meta, other tech giants over ‘foreign censorship’ of speech
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) is interviewed by FOX and Friends at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 3, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images
House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, sent subpoenas to eight technology companies asking for more information about their communications with foreign governments over concerns that they seek to “censor speech” in the U.S.
The subpoenas were sent Wednesday to the CEOs of Google parent Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and TikTok, as well as X and video platform Rumble.
“The Committee must understand how and to what extent foreign governments have limited Americans’ access to lawful speech in the United States, as well as the extent to which the Biden-Harris Administration aided or abetted these efforts,” Jordan said in a statement.
CNBC reached out to each of the subpoenaed companies for comment. A spokesperson for Microsoft said the company is engaged with the panel and “committed to working in good faith.”
A Rumble spokesperson said it “has received the subpoena and we look forward to sharing information related to the ongoing efforts of numerous governments around the globe who seek to suppress the innate human right to self expression.”
Jordan pointed to the European Union’s Digital Services Act, a similar set of laws in the U.K., called the Online Services Act, and regulations around illegal content and hate speech in Brazil and Australia.
The committee is seeking communications around the companies’ compliance with “foreign censorship laws, regulations, judicial orders or other government-initiated efforts” and any internal correspondence discussing those matters.
The subpoenas come after the Federal Trade Commission last week launched an inquiry into “tech censorship.” FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson said in a statement that the probe will help the agency “better understand how these firms may have violated the law by silencing and intimidating Americans for speaking their minds.”
The FTC’s request for public comment defines tech platforms as companies that provide a range of services, from social media and video sharing to event planning and ride sharing.
The Republican-led committee has previously accused major tech companies of censorship. The panel subpoenaed Alphabet, Meta and other firms in 2023, demanding they turn over communications between the companies and the U.S. government over censorship concerns.
Technology
Autodesk says it will cut 1,350 employees, or 9% of workforce, to make the most of sales changes
Andrew Anagnost, chief executive officer of Autodesk Inc., during a Bloomberg Television interview in London, UK, on April 25, 2023.
Chris Ratcliffe | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Design software maker Autodesk said Thursday that it will lay off 1,350 employees, which works out to 9% of its workforce.
The job cuts follow a series of large headcount reductions across the tech industry.
In January, Meta said it would let go of 5% of its workers, and earlier this month Workday, which sells human resources and finance software, announced an 8.5% decrease. Google this week also announced cuts to its human relations and cloud divisions, CNBC reported, and PC maker HP said in a Thursday regulatory filing that it would reduce its headcount by 1,000 or 2,000, representing under 4% of total headcount.
“Our GTM model has evolved significantly from the transition to subscription and multi-year contracts billed annually to self-service enablement, the adoption of direct billing, and more,” Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost wrote in a memo to employees. “These changes position us to better meet the evolving needs of our customers and channel partners. To fully benefit from these changes, we are beginning the transformation of our GTM organization to increase customer satisfaction and Autodesk’s productivity.”
The company is also conducting the layoffs to stay competitive in the current economy and protect the company’s leadership in cloud computing and artificial intelligence, Anagnost wrote.
San Francisco-based Autodesk will make facility reductions as well. But it will not close any offices, a spokesperson told CNBC in an email. It expects $135 million to $150 million in restructuring costs before taxes.
The company on Thursday also announced better-than-expected fiscal fourth-quarter results. The company delivered $2.29 in adjusted earnings per share on $1.64 billion in revenue, which was up 12% year over year. Analysts surveyed by LSEG had been looking for $2.14 per share and $1.63 billion in revenue.
For the fiscal first quarter, Autodesk called for $2.14 to $2.17 in adjusted earnings per share on $1.600 billion to $1.610 billion in revenue. Analysts polled by LSEG had expected $2.08 per share and $1.598 billion in revenue.
Management sees $9.34 to $9.67 in adjusted earnings per share for the 2026 fiscal year, with $6.895 billion to $6.965 billion in revenue. The LSEG consensus was $9.24 per share and $6.902 billion in revenue.
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