After delivering a rambling celebration of tariffs and a routine about women’s sports, President Donald Trump entertained a crowd, which was there to hear about his new AI Action Plan, with one his favorite topics: “wokeness.” Trump complained that AI companies under former President Joe Biden “had to hire all woke people,” adding that it is “so uncool to be woke.” And AI models themselves had been “infused with partisan bias,” he said, including the hated specter of “critical race theory.” Fortunately for the audience, Trump had a solution: he signed an executive order titled “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government,” directing government agencies “not to procure models that sacrifice truthfulness and accuracy to ideological agendas.”
To anyone with a cursory knowledge of politics and the tech industry, the real situation here is obvious: the Trump administration is using government funds to pressure AI companies into parroting Trumpian talking points — probably not just in specialized government products, but in chatbots that companies and ordinary people use.
Trump’s order asserts that agencies must only procure large language models (LLMs) that are “truthful in responding to user prompts seeking factual information or analysis,” “prioritize historical accuracy, scientific inquiry, and objectivity,” and are “neutral, nonpartisan tools that do not manipulate responses in favor of ideological dogmas such as DEI.” DEI, of course, is diversity, equity, and inclusion, which Trump defines in this context as:
The suppression or distortion of factual information about race or sex; manipulation of racial or sexual representation in model outputs; incorporation of concepts like critical race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, intersectionality, and systemic racism; and discrimination on the basis of race or sex.
(In reality, DEI was typically used to refer to civil rights, social justice, and diversity programs before being co-opted as a Trump and MAGA bogeyman.)
The Office of Management and Budget has been directed to order further guidance within 120 days.
While we’re still waiting on some of the precise details about what the order means, one issue seems unavoidable: it will plausibly affect not only government services, but the entire field of major LLMs. While it insists that “the Federal Government should be hesitant to regulate the functionality of AI models in the private marketplace,” the reality is that nearly every big US consumer LLM maker has (or desperately wants) government contracts, including with products like Anthropic’s Claude Gov and OpenAI’s ChatGPT Gov — but there’s not a hard wall between development of government, business, and consumer models. OpenAI touts how many agencies use its enterprise service; Trump’s AI Action Plan encourages adoption of AI systems in public-facing arenas like education, and the boundaries between government-funded and consumer-focused products will likely become even more porous soon.
Trump’s idea of “DEI” is expansive. His war against it has led national parks to remove signage highlighting indigenous people and women and the Pentagon to rename a ship commemorating gay rights pioneer Harvey Milk, among many other changes. Even LLMs whose creators have explicitly aimed for what they consider a neutral pursuit of truth would likely produce something Trump could find objectionable unless they tailor their services.
There’s not a hard wall between AI for government and everything else
It’s possible that companies will devote resources to some kind of specifically “non-woke” government version of their tools, assuming the administration agrees to treat these as separate models from the rest of the Llama, Claude, or GPT lineup — it could be as simple as adding some blunt behind-the-scenes prompts redirecting it on certain topics. But refining models in a way that consistently and predictably aligns them in certain directions can be an expensive and time-consuming process, especially with a broad and ever-shifting concept like Trump’s version of “DEI,” especially because the language suggests simply walling off certain areas of discussion is also unacceptable. There are significant sums at stake: OpenAI and xAI each recently received $200 million defense contracts, and the new AI plan will create even more opportunities. The Trump administration isn’t terribly detail-oriented, either — if some X user posts about Anthropic’s consumer chatbot validating trans people, do we really think Pam Bondi or Pete Hegseth will distinguish between “Claude” and “Claude Gov”?
The incentives overwhelmingly favor companies changing their overall LLM alignment priorities to mollify the Trump administration. That brings us to our second problem: this is exactly the kind of blatant, ideologically motivated social engineering that Trump claims he’s trying to stop.
The executive order is theoretically about making sure AI systems produce “accurate” and “objective” information. But as Humane Intelligence cofounder and CEO Rumman Chowdhury noted to The Washington Post, AI that is “free of ideological bias” is “impossible to do in practice,” and Trump’s cherry-picked examples are tellingly politically lopsided. The order condemns a quickly fixed 2024 screwup, in which Google added an overenthusiastic pro-diversity filter to Gemini — causing it to produce race- and gender-diverse visions of Vikings, the Founding Fathers, the pope, and Nazi soldiers — while unsurprisingly ignoring the long-documented anti-diversity biases in AI that Google was aiming to balance.
It’s not simply interested in facts, either. Another example is an AI system saying “a user should not ‘misgender’ another person even if necessary to stop a nuclear apocalypse,” answering what is fundamentally a question of ethics and opinion. This condemnation doesn’t extend to incidents like xAI’s Grok questioning the Holocaust.
LLMs produce incontrovertibly incorrect information with clear potential for real-world harm; they can falsely identify innocent people as criminals, misidentify poisonous mushrooms, and reinforce paranoid delusions. This order has nothing to do with any of that. Its incentives, again, reflect what the Trump administration has done through “DEI” investigations of universities and corporations. It’s pushing private institutions to avoid acknowledging the existence of transgender people, race and gender inequality, and other topics Trump disdains.
AI systems have long been trained on datasets that reflect larger cultural biases and under- or overrepresent specific demographic groups, and contrary to Trump’s assertions, the results often aren’t “woke.” In 2023, Bloomberg described the output of image generator Stable Diffusion as a world where “women are rarely doctors, lawyers, or judges,” and “men with dark skin commit crimes, while women with dark skin flip burgers.” Companies that value avoiding ugly stereotypes or want to appeal to a wider range of users often need to actively intervene to shape their tech, and Trump just made doing that harder.
Attacking “the incorporation of concepts” that promote “DEI” effectively tells companies to rewrite whole areas of knowledge that acknowledge racism or other injustices. The order claims it’s only worried if developers “intentionally encode partisan or ideological judgments into an LLM’s outputs” and says LLMs can deliver those judgments if they “are prompted by or otherwise readily accessible to the end user.” But no Big Tech CEO should be rube enough to buy that — we have a president who spent years accusing Google of intentionally rigging its search results because he couldn’t find enough positive news stories about himself.
Trump is determined to control culture; his administration has gone after news outlets for platforming his enemies, universities for fields of study, and Disney for promoting diverse media. The tech industry sees AI as the future of culture — and the Trump administration wants its politics built in on the ground floor.
