NuancedPerson

Joe Biden

Former US President

The 46th US president, whose AI approach was two-sided — the sweeping 2023 executive order requiring safety-test disclosure from frontier labs, paired with the CHIPS Act’s billions for domestic AI hardware and a framing of AI leadership as a national-security imperative.

Politician

Wikipedia Remarks on signing the AI executive order (2023)

In his words

To realize the promise of AI and avoid the risks, we need to govern this technology.

— Remarks at the White House, 2023

Without the right safeguards in place, AI can lead to discrimination, bias, and other abuses.

— Remarks at the White House, 2023

Biography

Joe Biden (born 1942) served as the 46th president of the United States from 2021 to 2025. His administration presided over the ChatGPT moment, and his response — voluntary commitments first, then the most expansive AI regulation ever attempted by Washington — defined the pre-Trump American approach to the technology.

Executive Order 14110

After extracting voluntary safety commitments from leading labs in July 2023, Biden signed Executive Order 14110 on October 30, 2023 — “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.” Invoking the Defense Production Act, it required developers of the most powerful frontier models to share safety-test results with the government, directed agencies to set standards against AI-enabled fraud, bio-risk and discrimination, and stood up the US AI Safety Institute. At the signing he called it the most significant action any government had taken on AI safety, and described being startled by a deepfake of his own voice. Kamala Harris carried the agenda abroad as his de facto AI envoy.

Revocation and legacy

The order became a partisan fault line: accelerationists cast its compute-threshold reporting as regulatory overreach, and Donald Trump revoked it on taking office in January 2025. In his January 2025 farewell address Biden returned to the theme, warning of an emerging “tech-industrial complex” concentrating power and wealth. His AI record is genuinely two-sided — the same administration also poured billions into domestic chipmaking through the CHIPS Act and framed AI leadership as a national-security imperative.