On 23 January 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence.” The order revokes Executive Order 14110, the October 2023 Biden order on “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence,” and reframes federal AI policy around what it calls retaining “global leadership” rather than risk mitigation.
The order directs administration officials to develop, within 180 days, an AI action plan aimed at sustaining America’s “global AI dominance” for economic competitiveness and national security. It instructs agencies to review every action taken under the prior order and to “suspend, revise, or rescind” measures judged to be obstacles to the new policy. It also requires the Office of Management and Budget to revise its two AI memoranda (M-24-10 and M-24-18) within 60 days to align them with the new approach, and it states a goal of developing AI systems “free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas.”
The reversal marked a sharp change in direction. The Biden order had imposed reporting requirements on developers of the largest models and emphasized safety, civil rights, and consumer protection; the Trump order treats those priorities as constraints to be reconsidered. For businesses, the change signals that US federal AI policy can swing significantly between administrations, making regulatory planning across multiple jurisdictions more important than betting on any single national framework.