Biden’s AI order didn’t go far enough to address fairness, but it’s a good first step, advocates say
US Vice President Kamala Harris applauds as US President Joe Biden signs an executive order after delivering remarks on advancing the safe, secure, and trustworthy development and use of artificial intelligence, in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on October 30, 2023.
Brendan Smialowski | AFP | Getty Images
After the Biden administration unveiled the first-ever executive order on artificial intelligence on Monday, a frenzy of lawmakers, industry groups, civil rights organizations, labor unions and others began digging into the 111-page document — making note of the priorities, specific deadlines and, in their eyes, the wide-ranging implications of the landmark action.
One core debate centers on a question of AI fairness. Many civil society leaders told CNBC the order does not go far enough to recognize and address real-world harms that stem from AI models — especially those affecting marginalized communities. But they say it’s a meaningful step along the path.
Many civil society and several tech industry groups praised the executive order’s roots — the White House’s blueprint for an AI bill of rights, released last October — but called on Congress to pass laws codifying protections, and to better account for training and developing models that prioritize AI fairness instead of addressing those harms after-the-fact.
“This executive order is a real step forward, but we must not allow it to be the only step,” Maya Wiley, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said in a statement. “We still need Congress to consider legislation that will regulate AI and ensure that innovation makes us more fair, just, and prosperous, rather than surveilled, silenced, and stereotyped.”
U.S. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris arrive for an event about their administration’s approach to artificial intelligence in the East Room of the White House on October 30, 2023 in Washington, DC.
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Cody Venzke, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, believes the executive order is an “important next step in centering equity, civil rights and civil liberties in our national AI policy” — but that the ACLU has “deep concerns” about the executive order’s sections on national security and law enforcement.
In particular, the ACLU is concerned about the executive order’s push to “identify areas where AI can enhance law enforcement efficiency and accuracy,” as is stated in the text.
“One of the thrusts of the executive order is definitely that ‘AI can improve governmental administration, make our lives better and we don’t want to stand in way of innovation,'” Venzke told CNBC.
“Some of that stands at risk to lose a fundamental question, which is, ‘Should we be deploying artificial intelligence or algorithmic systems for a particular governmental service at all?’ And if we do, it really needs to be preceded by robust audits for discrimination and to ensure that the algorithm is safe and effective, that it accomplishes what it’s meant to do.”
Margaret Mitchell, researcher and chief ethics scientist of AI startup Hugging Face said she agreed with the values the executive order puts forth — privacy, safety, security, trust, equity and justice — but is concerned about the lack of focus on ways to train and develop models to minimize future harms, before an AI system is deployed.
“There was a call for an overall focus on applying red-teaming, but not other more critical approaches to evaluation,” Mitchell said.
“‘Red-teaming’ is a post-hoc, hindsight approach to evaluation that works a bit like whack-a-mole: Now that the model is finished training, what can you think of that might be a problem? See if it’s a problem and fix it if so.”
Mitchell wished she had seen “foresight” approaches highlighted in the executive order, such as disaggregated evaluation approaches, which can analyze a model as data is scaled up.
Dr. Joy Buolamwini, founder and president of the Algorithmic Justice League, said Tuesday at an event in New York that she felt the executive order fell short in terms of the notion of redress, or penalties when AI systems harm marginalized or vulnerable communities.
Even experts who praised the executive order’s scope believe the work will be incomplete without action from Congress.
“The President is trying to extract extra mileage from the laws that he has,” said Divyansh Kaushik, associate director for emerging technologies and national security at the Federation of American Scientists.
For example, it seeks to work within existing immigration law to make it easier to retain high-skilled AI workers in the U.S. But immigration law has not been updated in decades, said Kaushik, who was involved in collaborative efforts with the administration in crafting elements of the order.
It falls on Congress, he added, to increase the number of employment-based green cards awarded each year and avoid losing talent to other countries.
Industry worries about stifling innovation
On the other side, industry leaders expressed wariness or even stronger feelings that the order had gone too far and would stifle innovation in a nascent sector.
Andrew Ng, longtime AI leader and cofounder of Google Brain and Coursera, told CNBC he is “quite concerned about the reporting requirements for models over a certain size,” adding that he is “very worried about overhyped dangers of AI leading to reporting and licensing requirements that crush open source and stifle innovation.”
In Ng’s view, thoughtful AI regulation can help advance the field, but over-regulation of aspects of the technology, such as AI model size, could hurt the open-source community, which would in turn likely benefit tech giants.
Vice President Kamala Harris and US President Joe Biden depart after delivering remarks on advancing the safe, secure, and trustworthy development and use of artificial intelligence, in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on October 30, 2023.
Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images
Nathan Benaich, founder and general partner of Air Street Capital, also had concerns about the reporting requirements for large AI models, telling CNBC that the compute threshold and stipulations mentioned in the order are a “flawed and potentially distorting measure.”
“It tells us little about safety and risks discouraging emerging players from building large models, while entrenching the power of incumbents,” Benaich told CNBC.
NetChoice’s Vice President and General Counsel Carl Szabo was even more blunt.
“Broad regulatory measures in Biden’s AI red tape wishlist will result in stifling new companies and competitors from entering the marketplace and significantly expanding the power of the federal government over American innovation,” said Szabo, whose group counts Amazon, Google, Meta and TikTok among its members. “Thus, this order puts any investment in AI at risk of being shut down at the whims of government bureaucrats.”
But Reggie Townsend, a member of the National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee (NAIAC), which advises President Biden, told CNBC that he feels the order doesn’t stifle innovation.
“If anything, I see it as an opportunity to create more innovation with a set of expectations in mind,” said Townsend.
David Polgar, founder of the nonprofit All Tech Is Human and a member of TikTok’s content advisory council, had similar takeaways: In part, he said, it’s about speeding up responsible AI work instead of slowing technology down.
“What a lot of the community is arguing for — and what I take away from this executive order — is that there’s a third option,” Polgar told CNBC. “It’s not about either slowing down innovation or letting it be unencumbered and potentially risky.”
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People walk past an Amazon Fresh store in Washington, DC, on August 26, 2021.
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Amazon plans to close all of its Fresh supermarkets in the U.K., in the latest recalibration of its grocery strategy.
The company said in a Tuesday blog that it’s preparing to close all 19 of its Fresh U.K. stores, “following a thorough evaluation of business operations and the very substantial growth opportunities in online delivery.” Five of the Fresh locations are expected to be converted into Whole Foods stores, Amazon said.
Amazon opened its first Fresh location outside the U.S. in London in 2021, about a year after it debuted the store concept in the Woodland Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles. Fresh stores offer cheaper prices and more mass-market items compared to Whole Foods, the upscale supermarket chain Amazon acquired for $13.7 billion in 2017. Many of the stores also feature Amazon’s cashierless “Just Walk Out” technology.
The Fresh store pullback in the U.K. comes as Amazon has continued to adjust its grocery ambitions. The company has slowed expansion of its Fresh grocery chain and Go cashierless stores in the U.S. It still maintains 500 Whole Foods locations and has opened mini “daily shop” Whole Foods stores in New York City.
At the same time, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and other company executives have touted the success of sales of “everyday essentials” within its online grocery business, which refers to items like canned goods, paper towels, dish soap and snacks.
Jassy told investors at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in May that he remains “bullish” on grocery, calling it a “significant business” for Amazon.
The company on Tuesday also said that it plans to offer same-day delivery of groceries, including perishable items, in the U.K. beginning next year.
The Chinese electric car manufacturer BYD presents its models at the Open Space Area during the IAA Mobility in Munich, Bavaria, Germany, on September 12, 2025.
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BYD has a backup plan if it gets cut off from the Nvidia chips it currently uses in its cars, a top executive at the Chinese electric carmaker told CNBC on Tuesday.
Stella Li, executive vice president at BYD, said the company had not received any directive from the Chinese government to stop using Nvidia chips — but if it did, it has a plan B.
“Everybody has a backup. BYD has [a] backup,” Li told CNBC’s Dan Murphy.
Li declined to expand on what the plan is, but she pointed to the Covid-19 pandemic during which there was a global shortage of semiconductors which badly affected the auto sector. BYD had “no issue” at the time because it developed a lot of its technology in-house, he said, so it was able to source alternatives quickly.
Indeed, BYD has sought to have control over large parts of its supply chain, from manufacturing its own cars to developing its own batteries.
“We have a lot of strong … even deeper technology in-house, so we always have backup,” Li said.
Nvidia, whose chips underpin much of the world’s artificial intelligence development, has been caught in the crossfire amid U.S.-China tensions. The company’s H20 AI chip — designed specifically to comply with U.S. export restrictions to China — was first banned, then permitted to be sold in China this year after a revenue-share deal between Washington and Nvidia.
Now, China has reportedly been discouraging local tech firms from buying Nvidia’s AI chips.
Nvidia designs an entirely different set of semiconductors for cars, however.
One of Nvidia’s systems, Nvidia Drive AGX Orin, is designed to enable cars to carry out some driving tasks autonomously. BYD is a customer of this product.
There is no indication so far that the Chinese government is looking to ban this Nvidia system.
Li said BYD had not been told to stop using any Nvidia products, adding it was unlikely that Beijing would ban the U.S. firm’s auto chips.
“I don’t think any country will do that, because this automatic will kill Nvidia,” Li said. “So Nvidia now is the highest market value company, so if they lose the big market from China … nobody wants to see this.”
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Amazon and the Federal Trade Commission are squaring off in a long-awaited trial over whether the company duped users into paying for Prime memberships.
The lawsuit, filed by the FTC in June 2023 under the Biden administration, alleges that Amazon deceived tens of millions of customers into signing up for its Prime subscription program and sabotaged their attempts to cancel it. Amazon has denied any wrongdoing.
The trial is being held in a federal court in Seattle, Amazon’s backyard. Jury selection began Monday and opening arguments are slated for Tuesday, with the trial expected to last about a month.
Launched in 2005, Amazon’s Prime program has grown to become one of the most popular subscription services in the world, with more than 200 million members globally, and it has generated billions of dollars for the company. Membership costs $139 a year and includes perks like free shipping and access to streaming content. Data has shown that Prime members spend more and shop more often than non-Prime members.
Amazon founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos famously said the company wanted Prime “to be such a good value, you’d be irresponsible not to be a member.”
Regulators argue that Amazon broke competition and consumer protection laws by tricking customers into subscribing to Prime. They pointed to examples like a button on its site that instructed users to complete their transaction and did not clearly state they were also agreeing to join Prime for a recurring subscription.
“Millions of consumers accidentally enrolled in Prime without knowledge or consent, but Amazon refused to fix this known problem, described internally by employees as an ‘unspoken cancer’ because clarity adjustments would lead to a drop in subscribers,” the agency wrote in a court filing last week.
The FTC says that the cancellation process is equally confusing, requiring users to navigate four webpages and choose from 15 options — a “labyrinthian mechanism” that the company referred to internally as “Iliad,” referencing Homer’s epic poem about the Trojan War.
Amazon has argued that the Prime sign up and cancellation processes are “clear and simple,” adding that the company has “always been transparent about Prime’s terms.”
“Occasional customer frustrations and mistakes are inevitable — especially for a program as popular as Amazon Prime,” the company wrote in a recent court filing. “Evidence that a small percentage of customers misunderstood Prime enrollment or cancellation does not prove that Amazon violated the law.”
A crackdown on ‘dark patterns’
The FTC notched an early win in the case last week when U.S. District Court Judge John Chun ruled Amazon and two senior executives violated the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act by gathering Prime members’ billing information before disclosing the terms of the service.
Chun also said that the two senior Amazon executives would be individually liable if a jury sides with the FTC due to the level of oversight they maintained over the Prime enrollment and cancellation process.
Amazon’s Prime boss Jamil Ghani and Neil Lindsay, a senior vice president in its health division who previously oversaw Prime’s technology and business operations, are named defendants in the complaint.
Russell Grandinetti, Amazon senior vice president of international consumer, is also named in the suit, but Chun argued he had “less involvement in the operation of the Prime organization” compared to Ghani and Lindsay.
Chun also scolded attorneys for Amazon in July for withholding thousands of documents from the FTC and abusing a legal privilege to shield them from scrutiny. Among the documents was a 2020 email where Amazon’s retail chief Doug Herrington said “subscription driving” was a “shady” practice and referred to Bezos as the company’s “chief dark arts officer.”
Representatives from Amazon didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Amazon also faces a separate lawsuit brought by the FTC in 2023 accusing it of wielding an illegal monopoly. That case is set to go to trial in February 2027.
The Prime case is part of the FTC’s broader crackdown on so-called “dark patterns,” which it began examining in 2022. The phrase refers to deceptive design tactics meant to steer users toward buying products or services or giving up their privacy.
The agency brought a similar dark patterns lawsuit against Uber in April, accusing the ride-hailing and delivery company of deceptive billing and cancellation practices tied to its Uber One subscription service. Uber has disputed the FTC’s allegations.
Earlier this year, it reached settlements with online dating service Match and online education firm Chegg over claims that their subscription practices were deceptive or hard to cancel.
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