The CEOs of every major artificial intelligence company received letters Wednesday urging them to fight Donald Trump's anti-woke AI order.
Trump's executive order requires any AI company hoping to contract with the federal government to jump through two hoops to win funding. First, they must prove their AI systems are "truth-seeking"—with outputs based on "historical accuracy, scientific inquiry, and objectivity" or else acknowledge when facts are uncertain. Second, they must train AI models to be "neutral," which is vaguely defined as not favoring DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), "dogmas," or otherwise being "intentionally encoded" to produce "partisan or ideological judgments" in outputs "unless those judgments are prompted by or otherwise readily accessible to the end user."
Announcing the order in a speech, Trump said that the US winning the AI race depended on removing allegedly liberal biases, proclaiming that "once and for all, we are getting rid of woke."
"The American people do not want woke Marxist lunacy in the AI models, and neither do other countries," Trump said.
Senator Ed Markey (D.-Mass.) accused Republicans of basing their policies on feelings, not facts, joining critics who suggest that AI isn't "woke" just because of a few "anecdotal" outputs that reflect a liberal bias. And he suggested it was hypocritical that Trump's order "ignores even more egregious evidence" that contradicts claims that AI is trained to be woke, such as xAI's Elon Musk explicitly confirming that Grok was trained to be more right-wing.
"On May 1, 2025, Grok—the AI chatbot developed by xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company—acknowledged that ‘xAI tried to train me to appeal to the right,’" Markey wrote in his letters to tech giants. "If OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini had responded that it was trained to appeal to the left, congressional Republicans would have been outraged and opened an investigation. Instead, they were silent.”