• Hours after his inauguration, President Trump rescinded 78 orders made by his predecessor.
• He rescinded a wide-ranging number of orders and actions that his administration deemed to be “harmful”.
• This includes an AI guideline from October 2023 that sought to address some of the bigger issues involved with ethical implementation of the technology.

Donald Trump is officially the 47th President of the United States. Only a couple of hours after his inauguration yesterday, Trump wasted little time in undoing the work of his predecessor, rescinded as many as 78 orders or actions that were implemented during the term of Joe Biden.

The rescinding ranged across a variety of different governmental departments, including reversals of climate change, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), pandemic response, immigration, and AI-related policy.

“The previous administration has embedded deeply unpopular, inflationary, illegal, and radical practices within every agency and office of the Federal Government,” an official statement explained.

“The injection of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI) into our institutions has corrupted them by replacing hard work, merit, and equality with a divisive and dangerous preferential hierarchy. Orders to open the borders have endangered the American people and dissolved Federal, State, and local resources that should be used to benefit the American people. Climate extremism has exploded inflation and overburdened businesses with regulation,” it continued.

On the matter of AI, the Biden administration outlined an AI framework in October of 2023 in order to address some of the larger concerns when it comes to the pervasive technology.

It aimed to tackle issues related to ethical and responsible development of AI-powered solutions, as well as look into elements surrounding how AI is trained, who owns what is AI-generated, along with how job security can be ensured as AI’s implementation becomes more widespread within businesses.

“That’s what this order does, bringing the power of the federal government to bear in a wide range of areas to manage AI’s risk and harness its benefits,” a senior Biden administration official said at the time, per Engadget.

Now all those guidelines and any associated work that has happening in the background has seemingly fallen away. This as “Executive Order 14110 of October 30, 2023 (Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence),” has now been rescinded.

With the Trump administration only needing a few hours to undo much of the work that Biden and Harris attempted to accomplish during their term, the next four years bring greater uncertainty than ever before.

How startups and companies working within the AI sphere will react to the rescinding remains to be seen.

[Image – CC BY-SA 2.0 Gage Skidmore on Flickr]