The Trump Administration is preparing an executive order as early as next week that would ban tech companies from government contracts if their artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots are not “politically neutral.”
A crackdown on supposedly “woke” chatbots, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, comes after a series of malfunctions by AI tools from Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Elon Musk’s xAI that exhibited blatant prejudice and hate-filled speech.
The White House is expected to announce several executive orders, including the “woke” AI directive, with the purpose of helping the U.S. maintain an edge in competition with China, the Journal reported. The orders would aim to promote exports of American chips and AI tools, and accelerate permitting for data centers.
An order around AI chatbots is entirely shocking. For years, Republican lawmakers have claimed left-wing bias in social platforms like Twitter and Facebook, as well as cries of censorship and one-sided fact-checking.
But the issue hit home this month, when xAI’s Grok chatbot spewed anti-Semitic vitriol, including calling itself “MechaHitler.” xAI subsequently addressed the hate speech.
Ironically, Musk lambasted Grok for liberal bias last month, leading to an over-correction that probably led to the fascist screed on Grok.
Last year, Google’s Gemini stirred a controversy when it generated photos of racially diverse Nazis and a black George Washington, forcing it to pause the launch of its image-generating app to stanch the issue.
A chatbot Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. has also generated factually incorrect or misleading images, or AI hallucinations.
The snafus caught the attention of AI czar David Sacks, who has criticized what he called a “doomer cult” among some AI leaders in Silicon Valley, the Journal reported.
The threat of withholding government contracts under a planned chatbot executive order is likely to gain the full attention of the tech industry, which increasingly is vying for federal deals.
This week, OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and xAI landed contracts worth up to $200 million from the Pentagon to expand federal use of their AI tools.
