The Trump administration has ditched the Biden administration’s encroaching artificial intelligence policies as it looks to a new approach.
Last Monday, the U.S. Department of Commerce issued a memo announcing it had “initiated a rescission of the Biden Administration’s AI Diffusion Rule.” This executive order and other AI-related rules resulted from a Biden-era executive order that gave the Commerce Department authority to regulate AI in a way that could lead to viewpoint discrimination and censorship. While President Donald Trump’s executive orders on AI have largely scaled back the government’s ability to censor speech, under the Administrative Procedures Act, these rules and regulations must be disbanded separately. MRC exposed the dangers of the Biden executive order (Initiative #7) in its 57 Biden-era censorship initiatives.
As MRC previously reported, the Biden executive order established mechanisms to curate AI platforms in accordance with the proper agendas:
Using the authority delegated to her under the order, [Commerce Secretary Gina] Raimondo created an AI Safety Institute (AISI) in the National Institute of Science & Technology (NIST). The “goal” of the Institute was “developing and disseminating AI safety practices” for restricting the information AI algorithms provided. Such a policy necessitates subjective determinations on what speech to favor. To craft this AI policy, Raimondo consulted Reid Hoffman, a billionaire tech mogul infamous for his obsession with censorship and lawfare.
While AISI still exists, it can no longer be used to censor due to Trump’s week-one executive orders including one on titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship”: “It is the policy of the United States to: …ensure that no Federal Government officer, employee, or agent engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.”
The order also incentivized a halt on research and development related to whether AI should be open or closed source, and as a result, “enabled Google’s censorship-heavy closed-source AI time to catch up to its open source AI competitors.”
The heavy and oppressive regulations instituted by the Biden era rules were supposed to take effect May 15, but the Trump Commerce Department put a halt to that.
The Commerce Department argued, “These new requirements would have stifled American innovation and saddled companies with burdensome new regulatory requirements. The AI Diffusion Rule also would have undermined U.S. diplomatic relations with dozens of countries by downgrading them to second-tier status.”
Under Secretary of Commerce for Industry and Security Jeffery Kessler issued the order reversing the Biden AI regulations. “We reject the Biden Administration’s attempt to impose its own ill-conceived and counterproductive AI policies on the American people,” he said.
Free speech is under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Google be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency and an equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
