AI Executive Order Summary: EOs 14179, 14365, and June 2026

Federal artificial intelligence policy is currently set by a series of executive orders issued during President Trump’s second term, layered on top of two late Biden-era orders that survived the transition. The operative AI executive orders as of mid-2026 are Executive Order 14179 (removing regulatory barriers), the July 2025 AI Action Plan it produced, Executive Order 14365 (preempting state AI laws), the June 2026 order on advanced AI innovation and security, and narrower orders on AI education and AI exports. Biden’s comprehensive safety and reporting order was revoked on January 20, 2025, but his infrastructure order (EO 14141) and cybersecurity order (EO 14144) remain in force.

The Operative AI Executive Orders at a Glance

EO 14148 (January 20, 2025): Revoked Biden’s EO 14110 as part of a broader rescission of prior-administration actions.
EO 14179 (January 23, 2025): “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence.” Sets the deregulatory policy direction and ordered the AI Action Plan.
EO on AI Education (April 23, 2025): Created a White House Task Force on AI Education.
AI Action Plan (July 2025): The 180-day plan mandated by EO 14179, organized around innovation, infrastructure, and international diplomacy.
EO on American AI Exports (July 23, 2025): Created the American AI Exports Program.
EO 14365 (December 11, 2025): “Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence.” Directs federal action against state AI laws.
EO of June 2, 2026: “Promoting Advanced Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Security.” Creates a voluntary frontier-model review and cybersecurity directives.
EO 14141 (January 14, 2025, Biden): Still in force. Governs AI data-center siting on federal land and clean-energy matching.
EO 14144 (January 16, 2025, Biden): Still in force. Cybersecurity order with AI-relevant provisions; amended June 6, 2025.

EO 14179: Removing Barriers to American Leadership in AI

Signed January 23, 2025, three days after Trump revoked Biden’s EO 14110, this order declared a policy of sustaining and enhancing “America’s global AI dominance” through systems “free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas.” It directed every agency to review policies stemming from Biden’s order and to suspend, revise, or rescind anything inconsistent with the new pro-innovation stance. Where immediate rescission was not possible, agencies were told to grant all available exemptions in the interim.¹

The order gave the OMB Director 60 days to revise two Biden-era memoranda — M-24-10 on AI governance and M-24-18 on AI acquisition — and required the development of an Artificial Intelligence Action Plan within 180 days.¹

OMB issued the replacements on April 3, 2025: Memorandum M-25-21 (governance) and M-25-22 (acquisition). The new governance memo kept several Biden-era structures, including the requirement that agencies designate Chief AI Officers, maintain AI Governance Boards, and publish annual inventories of AI use cases. It retained the concept of “high-impact” AI subject to minimum risk management practices such as testing and impact assessments, but dropped certain examples from the prior list, including election integrity and non-consensual voice or likeness replacement. The acquisition memo added language prioritizing AI products developed in the United States and set a 200-day deadline for a web-based procurement tool repository.²

The revocation of Biden’s order eliminated the mandatory reporting requirements for developers of the largest AI models, the red-teaming and safety testing mandates, interagency evaluations of AI threats related to biological and chemical weapons, and civil rights and equity oversight provisions covering hiring, healthcare, and law enforcement. Workforce development provisions, including expanded visa pathways and public-private research partnerships, also lapsed.³ Within days, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission removed its 2023 guidance on applying anti-discrimination law to employer use of AI, and the Department of Labor flagged its own AI hiring guidance as potentially outdated.⁴

The AI Action Plan

Released in July 2025, the plan is organized around three pillars: innovation, infrastructure, and international diplomacy.⁵

Deregulation and Content Requirements

The plan commits to identifying and repealing regulations that hinder AI development and directs federal agencies to consider a state’s AI regulatory climate when awarding discretionary funding. It orders a review of Federal Trade Commission investigations to ensure they do not “unduly burden AI innovation.” The Department of Commerce and NIST are directed to strip references to “misinformation,” “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” and “climate change” from the NIST AI Risk Management Framework. Federal procurement guidelines are to be updated to require that frontier AI systems be “objective and free from top-down ideological bias.”⁶

Infrastructure and Workforce

The plan calls for streamlined permitting for data centers, semiconductor manufacturing, and energy generation. It aims to restore domestic semiconductor production, create a financial market for computing power to help startups bypass long-term cloud contracts, and develop the electrical grid to meet AI’s growing energy demands. The Treasury Department is directed to clarify that AI training programs qualify for tax-free educational assistance, and the Department of Labor is tasked with establishing an AI Workforce Research Hub to study job displacement and fund retraining programs.⁶

Analysts at the Brookings Institution flagged a tension between the plan’s ambitions and other administration actions, noting that the National Science Foundation, assigned a central role in AI research, had simultaneously experienced defunding, staff terminations, and the cancellation of over 1,600 active research grants. Critics also argued the plan lacked adequate provisions for accountability, transparency, and evaluation of bias in historical training data.⁷

EO 14365: Preempting State AI Laws

Signed December 11, 2025, this order characterizes the growing number of state AI laws as a “patchwork” that hinders innovation and improperly regulates interstate commerce. It singles out Colorado’s algorithmic discrimination statute as an example of a law that might “force AI models to produce false results.”⁸

What the Order Directs

The Attorney General was directed to establish an AI Litigation Task Force within 30 days to challenge state laws deemed unconstitutional or preempted. The Secretary of Commerce was given 90 days to publish an evaluation identifying “onerous” state AI laws and to issue a policy notice making states with such laws ineligible for certain broadband deployment funds. The FCC Chairman was directed to consider adopting federal reporting standards that would preempt conflicting state requirements. The FTC Chairman was told to issue a policy statement explaining how the FTC Act preempts state laws that compel alterations to “truthful AI outputs.” The order carves out exceptions for state laws related to child safety, AI compute and data center infrastructure, and state government procurement of AI.⁸

Implementation and Legal Status

The DOJ formally established the AI Litigation Task Force in January 2026.⁹ The Commerce Department missed its March 11, 2026 deadline to publish the required evaluation of state laws.¹⁰

The Task Force’s first concrete action came in April 2026, when DOJ intervened in a lawsuit filed by xAI challenging Colorado’s AI Act. A federal magistrate judge stayed enforcement of the law on April 27, 2026, after the state attorney general stipulated to the stay pending legislative revisions. On May 14, 2026, Colorado Governor Jared Polis signed Senate Bill 26-189, which repealed the original statute and replaced it with a narrower framework, stripping the provisions on algorithmic discrimination, impact assessments, and deployer risk management, set to take effect January 1, 2027.¹¹

The preemption order’s legal foundations remain contested. Constitutional scholars have argued that the president cannot preempt state law by executive order without clear congressional authorization, and that recent Supreme Court decisions, including National Pork Producers Council v. Ross (2023) and Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton (2025), undercut the Dormant Commerce Clause arguments the order relies on.⁹ Congress has twice declined to enact legislation preempting state AI laws: the Senate voted 99–1 to strip such a provision from the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” and a similar moratorium was rejected in the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act.¹²

The June 2026 Order on Advanced AI Innovation and Security

Signed June 2, 2026, “Promoting Advanced Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Security” acknowledges that advanced AI presents national security risks and creates a structured framework for the government to evaluate the most capable models, while keeping industry participation voluntary.¹³

The Voluntary Frontier-Model Review

The order directs the NSA, in consultation with CISA, the National Cyber Director, the White House science advisor, and NIST, to develop a classified benchmarking process within 60 days to assess AI models’ cyber capabilities and determine which qualify as “covered frontier models.” The NSA Director holds final designation authority. Developers may voluntarily engage with the government to learn whether their models meet the threshold and, if so, provide access for up to 30 days before releasing them to outside partners.¹³ The 30-day window was reduced from 90 days in an earlier draft to avoid slowing U.S. competitiveness relative to China, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.¹⁴

The order explicitly states that it does not authorize “mandatory governmental licensing, preclearance, or permitting” for the development or release of AI models.¹³

Cybersecurity Directives

Within 30 days, the order requires the Committee on National Security Systems and the Department of War to prioritize cyber defense of their networks. CISA must release Binding Operational Directives to defend civilian federal systems, expand AI-enabled defensive tools, and facilitate cybersecurity access for critical infrastructure operators including rural hospitals and local utilities. The Treasury Department, working with the NSA and CISA, must establish an AI cybersecurity clearinghouse to coordinate vulnerability scanning and patch distribution.¹³

Within 60 days, the Office of Personnel Management must expand the “U.S. Tech Force Information Cybersecurity Specialist” hiring pathways, and OMB must identify federal grant funding available for AI vulnerability detection. The Attorney General is directed to prioritize criminal prosecution of actors who use AI to breach computer systems or commit fraud.¹³

Open Questions

Because the benchmarking criteria are classified, developers may not know in advance whether their models qualify, creating uncertainty about participation. The voluntary structure depends on industry goodwill, and analysts have noted that the federal cybersecurity workforce has been reduced over the preceding 18 months, raising questions about the government’s capacity to test models and implement a nationwide vulnerability remediation effort. CFR experts also pointed to an “unresolved disagreement” within the administration over whether the priority is innovation, military advantage, or risk mitigation.¹⁴

Narrower Orders in Force: Education and Exports

The AI Education order, signed April 23, 2025, established a White House Task Force on AI Education to coordinate K-12 AI literacy, a Presidential AI Challenge, public-private partnerships for instructional resources, and expanded apprenticeships and workforce training through the Departments of Education, Labor, and Agriculture.¹⁵

The AI Exports order, signed July 23, 2025, created the American AI Exports Program, directing the Commerce Department to facilitate “full-stack” AI export packages encompassing hardware, cloud services, data pipelines, models, and cybersecurity, with federal financing support. The order emphasized export control compliance and coordination through the Economic Diplomacy Action Group to counter international dependence on Chinese technology.¹⁶

Biden-Era Orders Still in Force

Two late Biden orders survived the transition.

Executive Order 14141, signed January 14, 2025, addresses AI infrastructure. It requires that new AI data centers be matched with clean electricity generation to avoid increasing grid emissions or raising consumer energy costs. It directed the Departments of Defense and Energy to identify federal sites for frontier AI data centers by early 2025 and launch competitive solicitations for private-sector leases, with construction targets of 2026 and full operations by late 2027. Private operators of frontier AI data centers on federal land must sign security agreements with the AI Safety Institute at NIST.¹⁷

Executive Order 14144, signed January 16, 2025, is a broad cybersecurity order with AI-relevant provisions. It mandates that software providers submit secure development attestations to CISA, directs NIST to update its Secure Software Development Framework, requires federal agencies to begin transitioning to post-quantum cryptography, and promotes the use of emerging technologies for cybersecurity defense. The order was amended on June 6, 2025.¹⁸

What Is No Longer in Force

Biden’s Executive Order 14110, signed October 30, 2023, was the most ambitious federal attempt to regulate AI development. It imposed mandatory reporting on developers of “dual-use foundation models,” required results of adversarial red-teaming tests be reported to the federal government, and set computing-operation thresholds that triggered reporting. It directed NIST to establish safety guidelines and the Department of Energy to build AI evaluation tools focused on nuclear, biological, chemical, and critical infrastructure threats. It also directed agencies to prevent AI from exacerbating discrimination in hiring, housing, and healthcare.¹⁹ All of it was revoked by EO 14148 on January 20, 2025.²⁰

The first Trump administration’s AI orders — EO 13859 (February 11, 2019), which launched the American AI Initiative, and EO 13960 (December 2020), which set nine principles for federal agency use of AI — have been superseded by the current governance framework built around EO 14179 and the revised OMB memoranda.²¹²²

Where This Leaves AI Developers and States

The current stack of executive orders imposes almost no direct mandates on private AI developers. There are no federal reporting thresholds for training runs, no required safety testing before release, and no licensing regime. Engagement with the June 2026 frontier-model review is voluntary, and the order says so on its face. The main federal levers over industry now run through procurement (the revised OMB memoranda and the Action Plan’s content requirements for systems bought by the government), export policy, and criminal prosecution of AI-enabled fraud and intrusion.

For states, the picture is different. EO 14365 puts federal broadband funding, DOJ litigation, and potential FCC and FTC preemption actions behind an effort to constrain state AI regulation, though Commerce missed its deadline to identify targeted laws and Congress has twice declined to enact preemption legislatively. Colorado has already repealed and narrowed its AI Act after federal pressure. Any mandatory federal requirements on AI development itself would need congressional action, a limit the administration’s own orders acknowledge by repeatedly disclaiming any licensing or permitting authority.

1
Federal Register. Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence
2
FedScoop. Trump White House AI Use Acquisition Guidance Government
3
Squire Patton Boggs. Key Insights on President Trumps New AI Executive Order and Policy Regulatory Implications
4
K&L Gates. The Changing Landscape of AI Federal Guidance for Employers Reverses Course With New Administration
5
ai.gov. AI Action Plan
6
White House. Americas AI Action Plan
7
Brookings Institution. What to Make of the Trump Administrations AI Action Plan
8
White House. Eliminating State Law Obstruction of National Artificial Intelligence Policy
9
Harvard Law Review. Executive Preemption and the Dormant Commerce Clause After Pataki and Paxton
10
S&P Global Market Intelligence. Companies Face Compliance Limbo as Trump Administration Targets State AI Laws
11
Carpe Datum Law. Colorados AI Reset — Two Weeks a White House Callout and a Pivot Away From the EU Model
12
Ropes & Gray. Examining the Landscape and Limitations of the Federal Push to Override State AI Regulation
13
White House. Promoting Advanced Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Security
14
Council on Foreign Relations. Assessing Trumps Executive Order on AI Oversight
15
White House. Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth
16
White House. Promoting the Export of the American AI Technology Stack
17
The American Presidency Project. Executive Order 14141 — Advancing United States Leadership in Artificial Intelligence
18
Federal Register. Strengthening and Promoting Innovation in the Nations Cybersecurity
19
The American Presidency Project. Executive Order 14110 — Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence
20
Federal Register. Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence
21
Federal Register. Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence
22
Trump White House Archives. Executive Order on Promoting the Use of Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence in the Federal Government