Trump team says he will repeal Biden’s ‘dangerous’ AI order, ‘hinders’ innovation

In an event aimed at addressing the potential disasters caused by future forms of AI, Harris made waves by pivoting to current concerns — and the need to code safeguards quickly without stifling innovation.

“When an elderly person is kicked off their health care plan because of a faulty AI algorithm, isn’t that existential for them?” Harris told a crowd in London last November. “When a woman is threatened by an abusive partner with explicit deepfake photos, isn’t that existential for her?”

Now she’s running for president, and her primary opponent, former President Donald Trump, has said he wants to “repeal” Biden’s order. Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, has also offered his own views on AI, influenced by his ties to some Silicon Valley figures who are pushing for limited AI regulation.

The growing presence of AI in everyday life has made it a popular topic of discussion but has yet to make it a top concern for American voters. But this may be the first presidential election where candidates are developing competing visions of how to guiding American leadership in rapidly evolving technology.

Here are the profiles of the AI ​​candidates:

Trump’s approach

Biden signed his AI executive order on October 30 last year, and Trump soon signaled on the campaign trail that, if re-elected, he would repeal it. His pledge was enshrined in his Republican National Convention address this month.

“We will repeal Joe Biden’s dangerous executive order that impedes the AI ​​Initiative and imposes far-left ideas on the development of this technology,” Trump’s platform reads. “Instead, Republicans support AI development based on free speech and human development.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for further details.

trumpet don’t spend much time talk about AI during his four years as president, although in 2019 he became the first to sign a executive order on AI. It directs federal agencies to prioritize research and development in this area.

Tech experts have previously pushed the Trump White House to adopt a more robust AI strategy to match what other countries are pursuing. In 2017, shortly before Google quietly unveiled a research breakthrough that laid the groundwork for the technology now known as generative AI, then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin Dismissing AI Concerns job replacement, saying that prospect was so far in the future that “it wasn’t even on my radar.”

That view later changed, with Trump’s top tech adviser telling business leaders in 2018 that AI-driven job displacement was “inevitable” and “we cannot sit idly by and hope that the market will eventually solve the problem.” The 2019 order called on federal agencies to “protect civil liberties, privacy, and American values” in adopting AI technologies and helping workers acquire the right skills.

Trump is also in the final weeks of his term. signed an executive order promoting the use of “trusted” AI in the federal government. Those policies are continuing in the Biden administration.

Harris’s approach

The launch of ChatGPT near the middle of Biden’s presidency made it impossible for politicians to ignore AI. Within months, Harris is convening the leaders of Google, Microsoft and other tech companies at the White House, the first step on the path to getting leading developers to agree to a voluntary commitment to ensure their technology won’t endanger people’s rights and safety.

Then there’s Biden’s AI executive order, which uses Korean War-era national security powers to oversee high-risk commercial AI systems but is largely aimed at protecting government use of the technology and setting standards that could spur commercial adoption. Unlike the European Union, however, the U.S. still lacks a common AI regulation—which would require Congress to pass.

Alondra Nelson, former director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said Harris brings a deep understanding of Silicon Valley to the White House because she grew up and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area and later served as California attorney general, where she built relationships with a number of tech leaders.

Even before ChatGPT, Nelson led White House efforts to draft a blueprint for an AI “bill of rights” to protect against the potential harms of the technology. But it was his speech at the Global AI Safety Summit in London that brought all those threads together and “laid out to the world what America’s AI strategy is,” Nelson said.

Harris said she and Biden “reject the false choice that we can either protect the public or promote innovation.” While acknowledging the need to consider existential threats to humanity, Harris emphasized “the full scope of AI risks.”

“She opened the door to a conversation about the risks and potential harms of AI,” Nelson said.

Vance and VCs

Trump’s selection of former venture capitalist Vance as his running mate adds a new element of differentiation between the campaigns, as does Trump’s newfound support from a group of AI-focused tech leaders including Elon Musk and venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.

Vance has acknowledged some harmful AI applications, but at a Senate hearing in July he said he was concerned that those concerns were justifying “some of the more precautionary regulatory efforts that frankly reinforce the position of the incumbent tech companies that we already have.”

Andreessen, a board member of Meta Platforms, criticized a provision in Biden’s order that requires the government to oversee the most powerful and seemingly riskiest AI systems if they can perform a certain number of mathematical calculations per second.

In a podcast with business partner Horowitz explaining their support for Trump, Andreessen said he was concerned about “the idea that we’re going to deliberately hold ourselves back through heavy regulation while the rest of the world is paying attention to this, and while China is paying attention to this.”

Horowitz read aloud the RNC’s call for Biden’s order to be repealed, saying “it sounds like a good plan to me” and noting that he and Andreessen discussed the proposals with Trump at a dinner.

Trump met with another group of VCs in a video podcast in June, sharing their view that AI leadership would require a huge amount of electricity—a view he echoed on the RNC stage when he said it would require “twice the amount of electricity that we have in our country.” That was the only time he mentioned AI in the 92-minute speech.

Are they much different in AI?

Much remains unknown, including how much Harris or the Trump-Vance ticket will listen to their rival’s base in Silicon Valley.

While rhetorical differences are deepening, “there are a lot of similarities” between how the Trump and Biden administrations are approaching AI policy, said Aaron Cooper, senior vice president of global policy at BSA The Software Alliance, which advocates for software companies including Microsoft.

Voters have yet to hear many details about how a Harris administration or a second Trump administration would change that.

“What we’re going to continue to see as technology evolves and as new issues arise, regardless of who’s in the White House, they’re going to be looking at how we can unleash the most benefit from AI while minimizing the most harm,” Cooper said. “That sounds obvious, but it’s not an easy calculation.”