Trump axes Biden's AI safety rules

Silicon Valley's biggest names spent inauguration day celebrating in Washington, and Donald Trump didn't make them wait long for their first major gift.

His very first day back in the Oval Office, Trump rescinded 78 Biden-era executive actions. Right near the top of that purge was Executive Order 14110, the sweeping framework Joe Biden signed in 2023 to put safety guardrails around frontier AI.

Stripping away the guardrails

Biden's original order was built entirely around defense and prevention. It invoked the Defense Production Act to force top tech firms to hand over safety testing results to the federal government before releasing powerful models to the public. It also tasked the National Institute of Standards and Technology and multiple agencies with hunting down potential risks spanning biological threats to cyberattacks.

The Republican platform had long blasted those rules as red tape strangling American progress. Trump made good on his campaign promise on day one by simply canceling the entire reporting regime.

Notably, Trump did not touch a separate executive order Biden signed just days before leaving office, which opened up federal lands owned by the Defense and Energy departments to help power massive new AI data centers. The message is clear: energy infrastructure is in, regulatory hurdles are out.

A 180-day regulatory vacuum

With the old rules scrapped, federal oversight is effectively in limbo. Trump's directive called for AI development that remains free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas, borrowing a familiar talking point from close tech adviser Elon Musk.

The job of building the replacement falls to venture capitalist and former PayPal executive David Sacks, whom Trump tapped as his special adviser for AI and crypto. Sacks has 180 days to deliver an official AI action plan focused on economic dominance and national security.

Some industry observers see the move as a clean slate. Eric Gastfriend, executive director of the nonprofit Americans for Responsible Innovation, told the Associated Press that the revocation works as a placeholder until the administration rolls out its own execution plan.

With Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Shou Zi Chew, Sundar Pichai, and Sam Altman all spotted in Washington for the inauguration, the industry's heaviest hitters are already seated at the table.

Why it matters

For frontier labs and developers, the immediate win is speed. Removing mandatory pre-deployment reviews takes Washington's hands off the release lever, allowing teams to ship advanced capabilities without jumping through bureaucratic hoops.

However, it also sets up a massive collision with Europe. While the EU marches ahead with its strict, binding AI Act, the world's leading AI superpower is taking the exact opposite path by throwing safety back onto voluntary corporate restraint. Anyone building software globally is about to navigate two violently conflicting rulebooks.

We think this aggressive deregulation will certainly accelerate US innovation in the short term, but living in a regulatory void for the next 180 days carries real downside. If an unchecked frontier model triggers a major security incident before Sacks delivers his framework, the backlash could end up hurting the industry far more than Biden's testing mandates ever did.