Biden's Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy AI

On 30 October 2023, US President Joe Biden signed at the White House an executive order titled Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence (Executive Order 14110).

Over a hundred pages, with directives to nearly fifty federal agencies, it was the most comprehensive AI regulatory framework in US history.

What It Required

The order set out eight objectives and dozens of specific measures. The industry-facing core can be summarised as follows.

1. Reporting obligation for large models. Companies developing models trained above a compute threshold (10²⁶ FLOPs, roughly GPT-4 class and above) had to report their training plans, red-team evaluation results, and capability assessments to the Department of Commerce. The legal basis—the Defense Production Act—was an unusual instrument for software regulation.

2. NIST-led safety standards. The National Institute of Standards and Technology was tasked with developing AI safety evaluation guidelines. This was the basis from which the US AI Safety Institute would later emerge.

3. Anti-discrimination. AI use in high-impact public domains—immigration adjudication, housing, hiring, criminal justice—was required to incorporate anti-discrimination safeguards.

4. Privacy. Stronger protections were called for over the personal data used in AI training, and Congress was urged to pass federal privacy legislation.

5. Federal-government use. Every agency had to perform AI risk assessments and appoint AI governance officials.

Industry Response

Major firms—OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Google—largely welcomed the order. Each already had a "responsible AI" policy, and alignment with the order's text was easy.

Criticism came from the open-source community and smaller researchers: drawing the line by compute threshold would stop working as models trainable at home grew capable; reporting obligations were textbook regulatory capture favouring incumbents.

Republican critique was also sharp: the executive branch was exercising power that belonged to Congress. Throughout the 2024 election season, a future Trump administration's intent to rescind the order was openly telegraphed.

Relative to the EU AI Act

Chronologically, Biden's order (October 2023) preceded the EU AI Act's final adoption (March 2024). But the EU's instrument was more systematic—a tiered risk-based classification—and carried the force of law. Biden's executive order was an executive order, not a statute.

An executive order is created and revoked by executive decision alone. That property would decide its fate in January 2025.

Fourteen Months

On 20 January 2025, the second Trump administration took office. Among the executive orders signed on day one, Initial Rescissions of Harmful Executive Orders and Actions listed EO 14110 for revocation.

The order's operative life ran roughly fourteen months. Because US AI regulation had been built on executive order rather than statute, it evaporated overnight with the change of administration.

Some of what had been implemented under it—the NIST guidelines draft, agency risk assessments, the international AI Safety Summit series—continued under inertia. Meanwhile, the EU AI Act remains as statute, and US firms must still comply with it.

What the document of 30 October 2023 left behind was less the regulation itself than a norm: that governments are entities that intervene in AI. That norm has continued to influence policy in many countries since.