MRC Free Speech America update summary: On July 23, 2025, the Trump White House unveiled its AI Action Plan, "Winning the AI Race: America's AI Action Plan," and on the same day, President Donald Trump signed three separate executive orders: "Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government," "Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure" and "Promoting The Export of the American AI Technology Stack," effectively promoting the AI Action Plan. The "Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government" executive order specifically directs the Federal Government to fulfill its obligation to not "procure models that sacrifice truthfulness and accuracy to ideological agendas. Building on Executive Order 13960 of December 3, 2020 (Promoting the Use of Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence in the Federal Government), this order helps fulfill that obligation in the context of large language models."
The following article is a supplement to the MRC Report: The Biden Administration Waged War on Free Speech with 57 Censorship Initiatives.
Initiative #8: The AI Speech Codes
Type of Censorship: Partnership
Agencies Involved:
- Department of State
- Bureau of Cyberspace & Digital Policy
- Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights & Labor (DHRL)
- Office of the Special Envoy to Monitor & Combat Antisemitism
- Executive Office of the President
- White House Office
- United States Domestic Policy Council (DPC)
- White House Office
- United States Agency for International Development (USAID)
Summary:
Predating and separate from its ham-fisted efforts to impose artificial intelligence (AI) censorship through official policymaking (see Initiative #7), the Biden administration labored to impose speech codes through partnerships with Big Tech platforms developing AI models.
- The Partnership for Global Inclusivity on AI
Secretary of State Tony Blinken created the Partnership for Global Inclusivity on AI (PGIAI) between the State Department and eight Big Tech firms: Amazon, Anthropic, Google, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and OpenAI. The Partnership’s stated purpose was to train AI to favor certain ideologies (and thus censor disfavored ideologies).
When creating the partnership, the State Department pledged to spend over $3 million specifically for AI to censor so-called "mis- and disinformation" and "hate," while the Big Tech firms agreed to also use their own resources for the same purpose. In a separate piece of the PGIAI, the Department of State agreed to seek additional funds for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to launch more censorship initiatives.
- The Anti-Semitism Symposium
The Office of the Special Envoy to Monitor & Combat Anti-Semitism hosted a “symposium” that would supposedly “combat online antisemitism” but was in reality a conference to coordinate censorship efforts.
The event was attended by the White House Domestic Policy Council Director Neera Tanden and the censorship outfits Center for Countering Digital Hate (which is deeply linked to the United Kingdom’s Labour Party) and Cyberwell. Leadership from the Big Tech platforms Google, Meta and TikTok, and German government officials, also participated in the conference. At the symposium, both domestic and foreign government officials colluded directly with Big Tech to target so-called “disinformation” and other forms of alleged “online harms.”
- The National Strategies
The White House itself boosted “whole-of-society approach” efforts to create AI algorithms to censor speech and debate.
The White House’s “National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism” and its very similar follow-up, the “National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia and Anti-Arab Hate,” both directed government actors would pressure “social media” companies to censor so-called “hate.” The strategy also demanded that Congress to pass censorship laws to further penalize Big Tech platforms which permit “forms of hate.”
Neither document made any attempt to define what “hate” and its “forms” consisted of, creating a nebulous standard that would make it easy for government officials to coerce platforms into silencing their critics.
Key Individuals:
- Jennifer Bachus, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Cyberspace & Digital Policy
- Joe Biden, President of the United States
- Antony Blinken, Secretary of State
- Nathaniel Fick, Ambassador-at-Large for Cyberspace & Digital Policy
- Deborah Lipstadt, Special Envoy for Monitoring & Combatting Antisemitism
- Samantha Power, USAID Administrator (and former UN Ambassador)
- Neera Tanden, Domestic Policy Council Director
