The Trump AI executive order: Humanity needs us to get this right

COMMENTARY: When the Trump administration last week released its AI executive order (EO) prohibiting state governments from enacting AI regulations, the backlash from state lawmakers was faster than Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff recently ditching ChapGPT for Gemini 3.0.

Parties on both sides of the aisle immediately scrambled to take their case to the court of public opinion, under a simple guiding political principle of not letting a good crisis go to waste.

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I sincerely hope leaders are reminded that government serves the public trust, especially at a time when global AI policy guidance desperately needs a North Star.

Everywhere we look these days, there’s an irrational exuberance surrounding AI from consumers who crave it — to industry demanding employees master it — and Wall Street wanting to profit from it.

However, the rush to infuse AI into every facet of our lives burdens our AI architects with a cognitive dissonance they openly struggle with: and lawmakers should pay attention.

Yes, there are public pronouncements that innovation across healthcare, finance, and manufacturing will enhance our standard of living, but we must consider the very real consequences of societal disfunction, millions of job displacements, and deepfake weaponization by threat actors.

History points out many examples in which government intervention was too slow to act when markets drove consumers to gorge themselves over insatiable appetites for the next big idea. For the first time in human history, technology has been on pace to replace the way we think, act, create, and discover at a scale so significant, it’s nearly impossible to conceive when or how this experiment ends.

There’s evidence of the need for intervention: Former developers have sounded the alarm to refute any assumption AI is controllable technology, and we’ve already reached milestones that draw comparisons to “Skynet” in the famous Terminator movies.

Even Google’s CEO Sundar Pichal, one of the leading developers and power users of AI, issued dire warnings of the outcomes AI could yield if ungoverned, yet markets reacted by pouring more investments into growth.

Unfortunately, the momentum shows no signs of slowing. Time magazine named Architects of AI their 2025 Person of the Year last week. Pichal suggests we could best mitigate the risks of AI if governments and companies work together on frameworks and responsible development. Call me cynical, but in my opinion, when leading technology leaders publicly ask for government help, it’s worse than we think. The repenting typically comes long after the sins have been committed, not while in progress.

Which leads us back to the recent EO, and concerns the president may preempt state laws. More than 40 state attorney generals signed a bi-partisan letter to congressional leaders requesting a provision not to block AI regulation for 10 years, which perfectly lines this up for a prolonged court battle.

Frankly, I’m not qualified to adjudicate the soundness of the arguments on both sides or even attempt to settle longstanding political food fights. I am hopeful our political leadership can go to neutral corners and re-examine a topic that’s far too important to allow their squabbles to get in the way of technology with boundaries that haven’t been discovered yet.   

If we examine the spirit and intent of the action plan, there may be cause for hope behind it, and an olive branch in the offering from the White House.

The nation that leads in emerging technology innovation establishes the rules based order for the rest of the world to follow. The U.S. lost that advantage when China was first to market with 5G.

My sense: this administration doesn’t want that to happen again.

Ultimately, the EO has the potential to place the U.S. in a much stronger position to lead a responsible consortium of countries for developing global AI policy, and there’s plenty of room at the table for states to contribute.

If the White House wants to avoid a patchwork approach to policy as well as consolidate decentralized federal interagency initiatives, it should create a national presidential commission on AI. That select group would include representatives from federal and state agencies, military, and industry leaders from every sector as advisors. This creates a uniform approach for both parties to not only collaborate at the national level, but take lead on a global stage on the responsible creation of governing policies to develop AI.

If lawmakers across the political divide fail to meet this moment and don’t recognize our evolution into technology that has the potential to create real crisis to humanity — AI might just replace them, too.

Tony Monell, vice president of public sector, Black Kite

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