President Donald Trump signed an executive order targeting “woke AI,” expanding his systematic assault on diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI. Trump signed the order on Wednesday at an AI Summit in Washington, D.C.
“The American people do not want woke Marxist lunacy in the AI models,” Trump said during his nearly one-hour remarks, in which he also vilified former Presidents Barack Obama and “absolutely terrible” Joe Biden, whose executive order on implementing racial equity in AI industries was “proudly terminated” by Trump.
The “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government” order instructs federal agency heads to ensure “ideological neutrality” in all AI tools procured via federal contracts or promoted by the government. Trump’s new directive also explicitly bars DEI and other racial or gender “concepts,” including critical race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, intersectionality, systemic racism, and even discrimination itself.
“DEI displaces the commitment to truth in favor of preferred outcomes and, as recent history illustrates, poses an existential threat to reliable AI,” reads the order. The order continues, “While the Federal Government should be hesitant to regulate the functionality of AI models in the private marketplace, in the context of Federal procurement, it has the obligation not to procure models that sacrifice truthfulness and accuracy to ideological agendas.”
During his remarks at Wednesday’s AI Summit, Trump told the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium audience, “It’s so uncool to be woke.” The president added, “I encourage all American companies to join us in rejecting poisonous Marxism in our technology.”
A. Prince Albert, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center and civil rights advocate in tech policy, told theGrio that Trump’s “Woke AI” order will, in effect, “hardwire outright biased technologies into the federal government’s provision of services.” Albert said leading AI systems are “rarely built with any meaningful input or insight from the diverse consumers they purport to serve.”
Albert continued, “For African-descendant, Indigenous, Latiné, Asian, Pacific Islander, or other historically marginalized communities in this country, our constellations of histories and cultures—our multiverse of perspectives, belief systems, contributions, and values—and our unquantifiable human potentials are vastly underrepresented or outright absent from the digital foundations of emerging technologies.”
Albert, who is also the founder of The Culture Keepers Circle, dismissed the Trump administration’s claim of protecting neutrality.
“This is not neutrality. It is the digital perpetuation of systemic inequity, masking bias under the guise of objectivity and fundamentally undermining the promise of AI for all people,” he told theGrio. “The true threats to ‘truthfulness’ and ‘neutrality’ in AI systems stem from the pervasive prejudices that are alarmingly over-indexed in the datasets on which these models are trained.”
Last week, Trump announced more than $90 billion of investments in data centers and other energy projects from AI and tech companies in Pennsylvania. The White House also released an action plan detailing how America will “win the race” for AI global dominance, particularly over China.
Hodan Omaar, senior policy manager for Information Technology and Innovation Foundation’s Center for Data Innovation, said that while the action plan shows how “serious” the Trump administration is about “winning the global AI race,” Americans must see “tangible improvements in the everyday areas of their lives where AI can make a difference.” Omaar said that includes “lower energy bills, better healthcare, faster disaster response, and more efficient public services.”
She added, “Whether these efforts scale and deliver results will determine whether the plan fulfills its dual promise: AI for the American people—and American AI for global leadership.”
A coalition of advocacy groups calling for a People’s AI Action Plan criticized the Trump administration’s AI action plan as prioritizing big tech and business over everyday people.
In a statement, the coalition said, “We can’t let Big Tech and Big Oil lobbyists write the rules for AI and our economy at the expense of our freedom and equality, workers and families’ well-being, even the air we breathe and the water we drink – all of which are affected by the unrestrained and unaccountable roll-out of AI.”
The groups urged, “The American economy needs robust innovation, a level playing field for all, and relief from the tech monopolies who repeatedly sacrifice the interests of everyday people for their own profits.”
