President Donald Trump on July 23 signed an executive order banning the federal government from using woke AI systems.
Trump's order creates powerful incentives for developers to produce unbiased AI models.
The path to the president's executive order "began with a simple recognition: AI systems were being trained on decades of content from which conservative voices had been systematically excluded," Larry Ward, the founder of Market Rithm, who has spent three decades building technology infrastructure for conservative media and organizations, wrote for Human Events on July 24.
"While Big Tech companies spent years shadowbanning, demonetizing, and algorithmically suppressing conservative media, they were simultaneously using that same poisoned dataset to train the AI systems that would shape humanity's future."
Among news groups most severely impacted by such policies, WorldTribune.com sent a cease-and-desist letter to Google LLC demanding that the massive platform:
'Terminate any and all codes, algorithms, tags, policies, or practices that limit or suppress the access, distribution, inboxing, search visibility, social media reach, and monetization of WorldTribune.com content.'
Ward had, for months prior to the executive order, raised the red flag about woke AI in a series of op-eds for Human Events.In May, Ward wrote "AI has a liberal bias problem—here's how to fix it", documenting how every major AI system demonstrated clear left-wing bias. The piece wasn't just analysis—it was a roadmap for action, outlining specific steps needed to restore balance to AI training data.
In July, Ward followed up with "AI has severe TDS, but President Trump can cure it", making the case that only presidential action could break Big Tech's stranglehold on AI development. The piece connected AI bias directly to the broader pattern of conservative suppression and called for decisive government intervention.
When Elon Musk's own Grok system defended itself by citing Media Matters and Rolling Stone as authoritative sources about conservative voices, Ward wrote "@Elon, Fixing Grok Is Not Enough", challenging him to go beyond surface fixes and address the fundamental data sourcing problem.
"Each piece built the case that AI bias wasn't accidental—it was inevitable when training systems on datasets that systematically excluded half of American thought," Ward wrote.
Trump's executive order "directly addresses every concern we raised. The order mandates that federal agencies can only procure AI systems that adhere to 'Unbiased AI Principles'—specifically requiring 'truth-seeking' and 'ideological neutrality.' "
Christopher Rufo, who noted he had "an inside view of the order’s development and worked with administration officials" gives major credit to Trump's AI czar David Sacks.
Rufo wrote in a July 28 op-ed: "Several weeks ago, Sacks reached out to me with a question: How can we define 'woke AI,' and what principles can we enumerate to prevent the government from purchasing ideologically compromised software?"
"The answer begins with the fact that artificial intelligence companies deliberately select the values embedded in the code base, which chatbots use to formulate responses to users’ questions," Rufo wrote. "For example, the AI company Anthropic published an official 'constitution' that outlines the values it embeds in its software, including those embodied in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and in several concepts borrowed from critical race theory. Since the software’s responses are filtered through those values, Anthropic has what many consider the most left-wing-biased AI."
Rufo continued: "All artificial intelligence companies have, explicitly or implicitly, baked an ideological formula into their 'constitutions,' 'system cards,' 'alignment principles,' or 'trust and safety rubrics.' The question is not whether an AI system will be built upon a set of values; the question is which set of values the programmers will select."
Trump’s executive order, Rufo added, "makes clear that while all AI companies are free to select any operating ideology, the federal government will purchase only software that is 'truth-seeking' and committed to 'ideological neutrality.' In other words, Washington will not do business with companies whose models will result in 'the suppression or distortion of factual information about race or sex; manipulation of racial or sexual representation in model outputs; incorporation of concepts like critical race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, intersectionality, and systemic racism; and discrimination on the basis of race or sex.' "
Ward noted that Trump's order "directly targets the core problem we identified: AI systems trained to serve ideology rather than truth."
Trump said in issuing the order: "We don't want woke AI" and "The American people do not want woke Marxist lunacy in the AI models."
The president, Ward noted, "was echoing arguments conservative voices had been making for months."
Ward concluded: "When technology this transformative reflects only half the nation's perspectives, it creates dangerous blind spots in everything from policy analysis to threat assessment. We cannot afford to build AI systems that mirror authoritarian approaches to information control. An AI ecosystem that cannot accurately represent conservative thought fails to capture the authentic American conversation and weakens our competitive advantage.
"The executive order ensures that America's AI reflects America's full character, not just Silicon Valley's limited worldview."
