Trump’s “Woke AI” ban: can AI be free of bias?
The Take
Al Jazeera
4.7 • 748 Ratings
🗓️ 31 July 2025
⏱️ 23 minutes
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Summary
US President Donald Trump says AI is too “woke.” His executive order targets what he sees as liberal ideology in artificial intelligence tools in federal tech. But what biases already exist in AI tools like chatbots, and can the technology ever truly be neutral?
In this episode:
- Alejandra Montoya-Boyer (@alejandramontyb), Senior Director, Center for Civil Rights and Technology
Episode credits:
This episode was produced by Diana Ferrero, Chloe K. Li, Marcos Bartolomé, and Julia Muldavin with Phillip Lanos, Spencer Cline, Melanie Marich, Marya Khan, Kisaa Zehra, and our guest host, Manuel Rápalo. It was edited by Kylene Kiang.
Our sound designer is Alex Roldan. Our video editors are Hisham Abu Salah and Mohannad al-Melhem. Alexandra Locke is The Take’s executive producer. Ney Alvarez is Al Jazeera’s head of audio.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Al Jazeera Podcasts. |
| 0:07.0 | Today, how AI is getting caught up in U.S. culture wars. |
| 0:16.5 | This week, President Donald Trump has signed three executive orders focused on artificial intelligence. |
| 0:21.9 | They focus on keeping so-called woke AI models out of the federal government. |
| 0:27.5 | But can AI really be free of bias? |
| 0:32.6 | I'm Manuel Rapalo, and this is The Take. |
| 0:49.0 | I'm Alejandra Montoya-Boyer, and I'm the senior director at the Center for Civil Rights and Technology at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. |
| 0:54.4 | The Leadership Conference is a coalition charged by its diverse membership of more than 240 national organizations to promote and protect the rights of all persons in the United States. |
| 0:59.2 | Alejandra, welcome to the take. On July 23rd, President Trump issued an action plan to bolster |
| 1:05.5 | what he calls, quote, American dominance of artificial intelligence. |
| 1:14.0 | President Trump today unveiled his broad approach toward faster development of AI with new proposals that he says |
| 1:18.4 | would reduce regulation, accelerate innovation, and position the U.S. ahead of China. |
| 1:24.1 | Now, President Trump also signed three executive orders. One of them was pretty controversial. It's a ban on what the president calls quote unquote woke AI in the federal government. What even is woke AI or anti-woke AI for that matter? How would you define it and how does it work? Well, I'm going to start with. There's actually no such thing as woke AI. There's AI technologies that |
| 1:48.8 | discriminate and then there's AI technologies that work for all of us. We know that AI is not |
| 1:54.0 | neutral. It reflects biases depending on how it's trained, designed, and deployed. And this specific |
| 2:00.5 | executive order around Woke AI is talking about prohibiting federal |
| 2:04.6 | contracts for AI technologies based on ideological bias and a social agenda around things like |
| 2:11.7 | anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion, mitigating against systemic racism, unconscious bias, discrimination on the basis |
| 2:19.1 | of race or sex, attacking things like transgenderism. And this type of executive order is really |
| 2:26.6 | a dog whistle that's attempting to make clear that the administration wants technologies that |
| 2:33.2 | subscribe to a very specific type of perspective. |
| 2:36.7 | I will be signing an order banning the federal government for procuring AI technology that has |
... |
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