Watch all the AI companies scramble to comply in a quest for government contracts. This will affect everyone who uses American LLMs and generative AI.

It should also open an opportunity for international competition from less censored models.

But anything the US feds contracted them for, like building data centres, they have to comply or they face penalties and have to pay all the costs back.

10 days ago, a week before this was announced, they awarded $200M contracts each to Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and xAI

This doesn’t doom the public versions, but they now have a pretty strong incentive to save money and make them comply with the US governments new definition of truth.

Because Executive Orders aren’t laws. They’re just guidelines for the executive branch of the federal government, which the POTUS is in charge of. It can’t affect private entities like AI businesses, because that would require an actual act of congress.

Notably, this would potentially determine what kinds of contracts the executive branch was able to make. For instance, maybe the government wants to contract out a LLM instead of building their own. This EO could affect which companies are able to bid on that contract, by adding these same restrictions to any LLM that they provide. But on its own, the EO is just that; an order to the executive branch of the federal government.

Well, in practice, no.

Do you think any corporation is going to bother making a separate model for government contracts versus any other use? I mean, why would they. So unless you can pony up enough cash to compete with a lucrative government contract (and the fact none of us can is, on fact, the while point), the end result will involve these requirements being adopted by the overwhelming majority of generative AI available on the market.

So in reality, no, this absolutely will not be limited to models purchased by the feds. Frankly, I believe choosing to think otherwise to be dangerously naive.