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News Analysis
In the Biden era, the government feared AI models would guide the spread of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. President Trump signed an order on “Preventing Woke A.I. in the Federal Government.”
David E. Sanger has covered Washington and the world for The Times for more than four decades, often writing on the intersection of new technology and national security.
July 23, 2025, 8:32 p.m. ET
When the Biden administration created an “A.I. Safety Institute” two years ago, its charge was to act as a kind of consumer safety commission for artificial intelligence, making sure that the app on your phone would not also make it easier for a terrorist to produce a chemical or biological weapon from easily-acquired ingredients.
President Trump and his aides appear animated by a different threat: “woke” A.I.
They cite the embarrassing incident last year when Google’s A.I. tool Gemini, asked to show a picture of America’s founding fathers, portrayed a Black rendition of George Washington and some of his fellow revolutionaries. Google shut down the tool’s image generator amid some mockery, but it became a rallying call for Mr. Trump’s MAGA movement and led to demands from the White House that the country’s A.I. giants cleanse their code so that answers are not infused with the language of diversity and inclusion or critical race theory.
So when Mr. Trump issued three executive orders on Wednesday to spur what his administration calls “A.I. dominance,” one of them addressed what his A.I. adviser told reporters was “political bias,” though it is not clear who — human or bot — will make that judgment.
“The American people do not want woke Marxist lunacy in the A.I. models,” Mr. Trump said Wednesday at a summit on the subject.
The weapons-of-mass-destruction concern, the administration has concluded, is well understood enough that it doesn’t require similarly urgent presidential intervention.
Few examples more vividly illustrate how the approach to managing perhaps the greatest technological shift in the world since the invention of the internal combustion engine or the airplane is being dealt with by a new administration.
