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.
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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:
Creatingnew 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.
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.
TikTok’s grip on the short-form video market is tightening, and the world’s biggest tech platforms are racing to catch up.
Since launching globally in 2016, ByteDance-owned TikTok has amassed over 1.12 billion monthly active users worldwide, according to Backlinko. American users spend an average of 108 minutes per day on the app, according to Apptoptia.
TikTok’s success has reshaped the social media landscape, forcing competitors like Meta and Google to pivot their strategies around short-form video. But so far, experts say that none have matched TikTok’s algorithmic precision.
“It is the center of the internet for young people,” said Jasmine Enberg, vice president and principal analyst at Emarketer. “It’s where they go for entertainment, news, trends, even shopping. TikTok sets the tone for everyone else.”
Platforms like Meta‘s Instagram Reels and Google’s YouTube Shorts have expanded aggressively, launching new features, creator tools and even considering separate apps just to compete. Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, traditionally a professional networking site, is the latest to experiment with TikTok-style feeds. But with TikTok continuing to evolve, adding features like e-commerce integrations and longer videos, the question remains whether rivals can keep up.
“I’m scrolling every single day. I doom scroll all the time,” said TikTok content creator Alyssa McKay.
But there may a dark side to this growth.
As short-form content consumption soars, experts warn about shrinking attention spans and rising mental-health concerns, particularly among younger users. Researchers like Dr. Yann Poncin, associate professor at the Child Study Center at Yale University, point to disrupted sleep patterns and increased anxiety levels tied to endless scrolling habits.
“Infinite scrolling and short-form video are designed to capture your attention in short bursts,” Dr. Poncin said. “In the past, entertainment was about taking you on a journey through a show or story. Now, it’s about locking you in for just a few seconds, just enough to feed you the next thing the algorithm knows you’ll like.”
Despite sky-high engagement, monetizing short videos remains an uphill battle. Unlike long-form YouTube content, where ads can be inserted throughout, short clips offer limited space for advertisers. Creators, too, are feeling the squeeze.
“It’s never been easier to go viral,” said Enberg. “But it’s never been harder to turn that virality into a sustainable business.”
Last year, TikTok generated an estimated $23.6 billion in ad revenues, according to Oberlo, but even with this growth, many creators still make just a few dollars per million views. YouTube Shorts pays roughly four cents per 1,000 views, which is less than its long-form counterpart. Meanwhile, Instagram has leaned into brand partnerships and emerging tools like “Trial Reels,” which allow creators to experiment with content by initially sharing videos only with non-followers, giving them a low-risk way to test new formats or ideas before deciding whether to share with their full audience. But Meta told CNBC that monetizing Reels remains a work in progress.
While lawmakers scrutinize TikTok’s Chinese ownership and explore potential bans, competitors see a window of opportunity. Meta and YouTube are poised to capture up to 50% of reallocated ad dollars if TikTok faces restrictions in the U.S., according to eMarketer.
Watch the video to understand how TikTok’s rise sparked a short form video race.
The X logo appears on a phone, and the xAI logo is displayed on a laptop in Krakow, Poland, on April 1, 2025. (Photo by Klaudia Radecka/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
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Elon Musk‘s xAI Holdings is in discussions with investors to raise about $20 billion, Bloomberg News reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The funding would value the company at over $120 billion, according to the report.
Musk was looking to assign “proper value” to xAI, sources told CNBC’s David Faber earlier this month. The remarks were made during a call with xAI investors, sources familiar with the matter told Faber. The Tesla CEO at that time didn’t explicitly mention any upcoming funding round, but the sources suggested xAI was preparing for a substantial capital raise in the near future.
The funding amount could be more than $20 billion as the exact figure had not been decided, the Bloomberg report added.
Artificial intelligence startup xAI didn’t immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment outside of U.S. business hours.
The AI firm last month acquired X in an all-stock deal that valued xAI at $80 billion and the social media platform at $33 billion.
“xAI and X’s futures are intertwined. Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent,” Musk said on X, announcing the deal. “This combination will unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach.”
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai during the Google I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California, on May 10, 2023.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Alphabet‘s stock gained 3% Friday after signaling strong growth in its search and advertising businesses amid a competitive artificial intelligence environment and uncertain macro backdrop.
“GOOGL‘s pace of GenAI product roll-out is accelerating with multiple encouraging signals,” wrote Morgan Stanley‘s Brian Nowak. “Macro uncertainty still exists but we remain [overweight] given GOOGL’s still strong relative position and improving pace of GenAI enabled product roll-out.”
The search giant posted earnings of $2.81 per share on $90.23 billion in revenues. That topped the $89.12 billion in sales and $2.01 in EPS expected by LSEG analysts. Revenues grew 12% year-over-year and ahead of the 10% anticipated by Wall Street.
Net income rose 46% to $34.54 billion, or $2.81 per share. That’s up from $23.66 billion, or $1.89 per share, in the year-ago period. Alphabet said the figure included $8 billion in unrealized gains on its nonmarketable equity securities connected to its investment in a private company.
Adjusted earnings, excluding that gain, were $2.27 per share, according to LSEG, and topped analyst expectations.
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Alphabet shares have pulled back about 16% this year as it battles volatility spurred by mounting trade war fears and worries that President Donald Trump‘s tariffs could crush the global economy. That would make it more difficult for Alphabet to potentially acquire infrastructure for data centers powering AI models as it faces off against competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic to develop largely language models.
During Thursday’s call with investors, Alphabet suggested that it’s too soon to tally the total impact of tariffs. However, Google’s business chief Philipp Schindler said that ending the de minimis trade exemption in May, which created a loophole benefitting many Chinese e-commerce retailers, could create a “slight headwind” for the company’s ads business, specifically in the Asia-Pacific region. The loophole allows shipments under $800 to come into the U.S. duty-free.
Despite this backdrop, Alphabet showed steady growth in its advertising and search business, reporting $66.89 billion in revenues for its advertising unit. That reflected 8.5% growth from the year-ago period. The company reported $8.93 billion in advertising revenue for its YouTube business, shy of an $8.97 billion estimate from StreetAccount.
Alphabet’s “Search and other” unit rose 9.8% to $50.7 billion, up from $46.16 billion last year. The company said that its AI Overviews tool used in its Google search results page has accumulated 1.5 billion monthly users from a billion in October.
Bank of America analyst Justin Post said that Wall Street is underestimating the upside potential and “monetization ramp” from this tool and cloud demand fueled by AI.
“The strong 1Q search performance, along with constructive comments on Gemini [large language model] performance and [AI Overviews] adoption could help alleviate some investor concerns on AI competition,” Post wrote in a note.