U.S. President Donald Trump holds an executive order related to AI after signing it during the "Winning the AI Race" Summit in Washington D.C., U.S., July 23, 2025.
U.S. President Donald Trump has vowed to keep "woke AI" models out of Washington and to turn the country into an "AI export powerhouse" through the signing of three artificial intelligence-focused executive orders on Wednesday.
The phasing out of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives — an umbrella term encompassing various practices, policies, and strategies aimed at fostering a more inclusive and equitable culture — has been a major focus of the second Trump administration. Now, the White House is bringing the battle to AI.
The "PREVENTING WOKE AI IN THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT" order states that the federal government "has the obligation not to procure models that sacrifice truthfulness and accuracy to ideological agendas."
The executive order identifies DEI as one of the "most pervasive and destructive" of these ideologies to be kept out of AI models used by the government.
"LLMs shall be neutral, nonpartisan tools that do not manipulate responses in favor of ideological dogmas such as DEI," the order said, adding that developers should not intentionally encode partisan or ideological judgments into an LLM's outputs unless those judgments are prompted by users.
As acknowledged by the order, the use of AI is increasingly prevalent across Americans' daily lives and is expected to play a critical role in the way they learn and consume information — making "reliable outputs" necessary.
In the eyes of the Trump administration, DEI in AI can lead to discriminatory outcomes; distort and manipulate AI model outputs in regard to race and sex; and incorporate concepts like critical race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, intersectionality and systemic racism.
"DEI displaces the commitment to truth in favor of preferred outcomes and, as recent history illustrates, poses an existential threat to reliable AI," the anti-woke order reads.