Biden's Final AI Flurry Raises Important Questions for President Trump to Answer

Former President Biden’s final week was jam-packed with AI policy. The same can be said about President Trump’s first week in office. AI is a critical topic for any U.S. president to address.

Here’s a timeline of what’s happened so far, in less than two weeks:

January 13th: The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) significantly expanded its export controls on AI chips. These rules will impact data centers, cloud computing, and AI models worldwide.

January 14th: Biden issues an executive order on AI infrastructure, which directs federal agencies to expedite the development of AI data centers and energy production.

January 15th: BIS publishes another lengthy update to AI chip export controls, which closes critical loopholes like a TSMC-to-Huawei pipeline.

January 16th: Biden issues an executive order titled “Strengthening and Promoting Innovation in the Nation’s Cybersecurity,” which features a section focused squarely on AI.‍

January 20th: On his first day in office, Trump immediately revokes Biden’s flagship 2023 executive order on AI.

January 20th: Trump takes several important actions to expand energy production in the United States.

January 21st: Trump joins OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son to announce the Stargate Project, a new company that hopes to invest $500 billion in computing infrastructure for OpenAI by 2029.

January 23rd: Trump issues his first AI executive order, which sets official U.S. policy to “sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance in order to promote human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security.” By July 22nd, a range of senior White House policy officials will develop an action plan to achieve this policy.

The Trump administration has yet to touch any of Biden’s final-week AI actions. That’s understandable since many of them address bipartisan priorities that Trump and Biden share, such as cybersecurity, energy production, and U.S.-China competition. Further, some of Biden’s final rules—most notably the revised chip export controls—are quite complex, making them difficult to modify on such short notice effectively.

As the Trump administration decides how to handle Biden’s final AI flurry and develop its AI action plan, it will need to answer some critical questions:

1. How much funding should BIS receive to enforce U.S. export controls and prevent chip smuggling to China?
2. What security standards are adequate for defending frontier AI data centers, software systems, and trade secrets against espionage operations and cyber attacks?
3. Which criteria—such as specific capability evaluation results—should inform decisions about restricting the export of closed-source AI model weights based on their potential military applications?
4. How should cloud computing providers respond to foreign customers seeking to train large AI models?
5. What’s the next big project to advance AI reliability at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)?
6. Are large AI developers building critical infrastructure? If so, who will make sure they promptly report cyber incidents like other operators of critical infrastructure?

The Center for AI Policy looks forward to working with the Trump administration as it continues to make critical decisions about the future of AI.