When DeepSeek, Alibaba, and other Chinese firms released their AI models, Western researchers quickly noticed they sidestepped questions critical of the Chinese Communist Party. U.S. officials later confirmed that these tools are engineered to reflect Beijing’s talking points, raising concerns about censorship and bias.
American AI leaders like OpenAI have pointed to this as justification for advancing their tech quickly, without too much regulation or oversight. As OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane wrote in a LinkedIn post last month, there is a contest between “US-led democratic AI and Communist-led China’s autocratic AI.”
An executive order signed Wednesday by President Donald Trump that bans “woke AI” and AI models that aren’t “ideologically neutral” from government contracts could disrupt that balance.
The order calls out diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), calling it a “pervasive and destructive” ideology that can “distort the quality and accuracy of the output.” Specifically, the order refers to information about race or sex, manipulation of racial or sexual representation, critical race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, intersectionality, and systemic racism.
