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
The Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, June 9, 2023.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Silicon Valley executives and financiers publicly opened their wallets in support of President Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential run. The early returns in 2025 aren’t great, to say the least.
Following Trump’s sweeping tariff plan announced Wednesday, the Nasdaq suffered steep consecutive daily drops to finish 10% lower for the week, the index’s worst performance since the beginning of the Covid pandemic in 2020.
The tech industry’s leading CEO’s rushed to contribute to Trump’s inauguration in January and paraded to Washington, D.C., for the event. Since then, it’s been a slog.
The market can always turn around, but economists and investors aren’t optimistic, and concerns are building of a potential recession. The seven most valuable U.S. tech companies lost a combined $1.8 trillion in market cap in two days.
Apple slid 14% for the week, its biggest drop in more than five years. Tesla, led by top Trump adviser Elon Musk, plunged 9.2% and is now down more than 40% for the year. Musk contributed close to $300 million to help propel Trump back to the White House.
Nvidia, Meta and Amazon all suffered double-digit drops for the week. For Amazon, a ninth straight weekly decline marks its longest such losing streak since 2008.
With Wall Street selling out of risky assets on concern that widespread tariff hikes will punish the U.S. and global economy, the fallout has drifted down to the IPO market. Online lender Klarna and ticketing marketplace StubHub delayed their IPOs due to market turbulence, just weeks after filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and fintech company Chime is also reportedly delaying its listing.
CoreWeave, a provider of artificial intelligence infrastructure, last week became the first venture-backed company to raise more than $1 billion in a U.S. IPO since 2021. But the company slashed its offering, and trading has been very volatile in its opening days on the market. The stock plunged 12% on Friday, leaving it 17% above its offer price but below the bottom of its initial range.
“You couldn’t create a worse market and macro environment to go public,” said Phil Haslett, co-founder of EquityZen, a platform for investing in private companies. “Way too much turbulence. All flights are grounded until further notice.”
CoreWeave investor Mark Klein of SuRo Capital previously told CNBC that the company could be the first in an “IPO parade.” Now he’s backtracking.
“It appears that the IPO parade has been temporarily halted,” Klein told CNBC by email on Friday. “The current tariff situation has prompted these companies to pause and assess its impact.”
‘Cave rapidly’
During last year’s presidential campaign, prominent venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen backed Trump, expecting that his administration would usher in a boom and eliminate some of the hurdles to startup growth set up by the Biden administration. Andreessen and his partner, Ben Horowitz, said in July that their financial support of the Trump campaign was due to what they called a better “little tech agenda.”
A spokesperson for Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment.
Some techies who supported Trump in the campaign have taken to social media to defend their positions.
Venture capitalist Keith Rabois, a managing director at Khosla Ventures, posted on X on Thursday that “Trump Derangement Syndrome has morphed into Tariff Derangement Syndrome.” He said tariffs aren’t inflationary, are effective at reducing fentanyl imports, and he expects that “most other countries will cave and cave rapidly.”
That was before China’s Finance Ministry said on Friday that it will impose a 34% tariff on all goods imported from the U.S. starting on April 10.
At Sequoia Capital, which is the biggest investor in Klarna, outspoken Trump supporter Shaun Maguire, wrote on X, “The first long-term thinking President of my lifetime,” and said in a separate post that, “The price of stocks says almost nothing about the long term health of an economy.”
However, Allianz Chief Economic Advisor Mohamed El-Erian warned on Friday that Trump’s extensive raft of import tariffs are putting the U.S. economy at risk of recession.
“You’ve had a major repricing of growth prospects, with a recession in the U.S. going up to 50% probability, you’ve seen an increase in inflation expectations, up to 3.5%,” he told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro on the sidelines of the Ambrosetti Forum in Cernobbio, Italy.
Former Microsoft CEOs Bill Gates, left, and Steve Ballmer, center, pose for photos with CEO Satya Nadella during an event celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Microsoft on April 4, 2025 in Redmond, Washington.
Stephen Brashear | Getty Images
Meanwhile, executives at tech’s megacap companies were largely silent this week, and their public relations representatives declined to provide comments about their thinking.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was in the awkward position on Friday of celebrating his company’s 50th anniversary at corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Alongside Microsoft’s prior two CEOs, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Nadella sat down with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin for a televised interview that was planned well before Trump’s tariff announcement.
When asked about the tariffs at the top of the interview, Nadella effectively dodged the question and avoided expressing his views about whether the new policies will hamper Microsoft’s business.
Ballmer, who was succeeded by Nadella in 2014, acknowledged to Sorkin that “disruption is very hard on people” and that, “as a Microsoft shareholder, this kind of thing is not good.” Ballmer and Gates are two of the 12 wealthiest people in the world thanks to their Microsoft fortunes.
C-suites may not be able to stay quiet for long, especially if the recent turmoil spills into next week.
Lise Buyer, who previously helped guide Google through its IPO and now works as an adviser to companies going public, said there’s no appetite for risk in the market under these conditions. But there is risk that staffers get jittery, and they’ll surely look to their leaders for some reassurance.
“Until markets settle out and we have the opportunity to access valuation levels, public company CEOs should work to calm potentially distressed employees,” Buyer said in an email. “And private company managements should refine plans to get by on dollars already in the treasury.”
— CNBC’s Hayden Field, Jordan Novet, Leslie Picker, Annie Palmer and Samantha Subin contributed to this report.
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