Earlier this summer, Grok shocked the world after Musk announced he would be updating the bot to eliminate a supposed liberal bias. The unhinged chatbot began spouting offensive outputs, including antisemitic posts that praised Hitler as well as proclaiming itself “MechaHitler.”
But those obvious biases did not conflict with the Pentagon’s decision to grant xAI a $200 million federal contract. In a statement, a Pentagon spokesperson insisted that “the antisemitism episode wasn’t enough to disqualify” xAI, NBC News reported, partly since “several frontier AI models have produced questionable outputs.”
The Pentagon’s statement suggested that the government expected to deal with such risks while seizing the opportunity of rapidly deploying emerging AI technology into government prototype processes. And perhaps notably, Trump provides a carveout for any agencies using AI models to safeguard national security, which could exclude the Pentagon from experiencing any “anti-woke” delays in accessing frontier models.
But that won’t help other agencies that must figure out how to assess models to meet anti-woke AI requirements over the next few months. And those assessments could cause delays that Trump may wish to avoid in pushing for widespread AI adoption across government.
Trump’s anti-woke AI agenda may be impossible
On the same day that Trump issued his anti-woke AI order, his AI Action Plan promised an AI “renaissance” fueling “intellectual achievements” by “unraveling ancient scrolls once thought unreadable, making breakthroughs in scientific and mathematical theory, and creating new kinds of digital and physical art.”
To achieve that, the US must “innovate faster and more comprehensively than our competitors” and eliminate regulatory barriers impeding innovation in order to “set the gold standard for AI worldwide.”
However, achieving the anti-woke ambitions of both orders raises a technical problem that even the president must accept currently has no solution. In his AI Action Plan, Trump acknowledged that “the inner workings of frontier AI systems are poorly understood,” with even “advanced technologists” unable to explain “why a model produced a specific output.”
Whether requiring AI companies to explain their AI outputs to win government contracts will mess with other parts of Trump’s action plan remains to be seen. But Samir Jain, vice president of policy at a civil liberties group called the Center for Democracy and Technology, told the NYT that he predicts the anti-woke AI agenda will set “a really vague standard that’s going to be impossible for providers to meet.”
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