White House Orders Federal Institutions To Develop Strategy And Appoint AI Leaders

JAKARTA The White House on Monday announced that all federal agencies were ordered to appoint principal AI (chief AI officer) officials and develop strategies to expand the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in government operations. This order also revokes President Joe Biden's era policy which previously focused on securing AI use.

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) ordered government institutions to implement minimum risk management practices for the use of AI to have a high impact and develop special policies related to AI-generative in the next few months.

Government institutions must adopt a pro-innovation approach and a future view to take advantage of this technology in shaping the future of government operations, as written in the memo.

This memo revoked two previous orders from the era of President Joe Biden's administration. One of the orders asked government agencies to implement security to protect citizens' rights and ensure transparency, as well as limit the procurement process for AI technology. Other orders also request that agencies appoint main AI officials.

President Donald Trump has previously revoked a 2023 executive order from Biden requiring AI developers to share data as an effort to reduce risks.

In its latest statement, the White House ordered that within six months, each agency develops an AI strategy to identify and remove barriers in the use of responsible AI, as well as to increase the overall maturity of AI technology in its institutions.

The White House confirmed that it would no longer impose unnecessary bureaucratic restrictions on the use of American-made AI innovation in the executive environment.

In a separate directive, the White House also stated that it wanted to accelerate and simplify the process of procuring AI technology in government institutions, by emphasizing the importance of interoperability between systems.

Institutions are also asked to maximize the use of American-made AI while maintaining data privacy and security protection.

This new approach is also claimed to eliminate reporting obligations that burden and optimize the technology acquisition process.

A number of federal agencies have indeed started using AI to solve various problems. For example, the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) uses machine learning and language modeling to scan incident reports and trace various data sources in order to find risk patterns in flight.