Executive Order 14110 on Safe, Secure, Trustworthy AI

Scope and obligations

Partially rescinded by EO 14179 (Jan 2025). Some §4 reporting persists via Defense Production Act + BIS interim rule.

Executive Order 14110 on Safe, Secure, Trustworthy AI addresses 9 contested AI-governance topics explicitly, 10 via general principles,.

Topics governed

• governs
  Foundation Models / GPAI— §4.2(a) — Defense Production Act reporting
• implicit
  Biometric Identification— §7 civil rights; sectoral agencies retain authority
• governs
  Deepfakes / Synthetic Content— §4.5 (content authentication, watermarking)
• implicit
  AI in Employment— §6 + DOL guidance; sectoral
• implicit
  AI in Healthcare— §8 + HHS strategy
• governs
  AI in Criminal Justice— §7.1(b) (DOJ AI use review)
• implicit
  AI in Education— §8(b) + ED guidance
• governs
  Compute-Threshold Reporting— §4.2(a)(i) — 10²⁶ FLOP threshold
• implicit
  Transparency Obligations— §4.2(a)(i) (reporting includes red-team results)
• governs
  Sovereign AI Doctrine— §4.8 (BIS export controls leverage)
• governs
  Catastrophic & Existential Risk— §4.2(a)(ii) — CBRN + autonomous replication explicitly named
• governs
  Technological Sovereignty— §4.8 + CHIPS Act overlap (BIS export controls, domestic compute)
• implicit
  Open-Weight Frontier Release— §4.6 NTIA report on dual-use foundation models specifically addresses open-weight risk; not binding obligation
• governs
  Synthetic Content Provenance— §4.5(a) — content authentication + watermarking standards via NIST + Commerce
• implicit
  AI in Elections— §5 / §7 civil rights references touch election-AI; not addressed as a discrete domain
• implicit
  Compute + Model-Weight Export Controls— §4.2(b) directs export-control coordination via BIS; not the primary venue but the policy hook
• implicit
  Environmental Impact of AI Training— §5.2 directs environmental-review consideration; §4.2 reporting includes some energy data
• governs
  National Security Carveouts in AI Regulation— §11 national-security exemption; NSM-10 parallel-track governance for national-security AI
• implicit
  AI-Driven Worker Displacement— §6 workforce + §6(c) future-of-work studies; not operational obligations

Enforcement record

Documented enforcement actions catalogued against Executive Order 14110 on Safe, Secure, Trustworthy AI (or against rules that this instrument now subsumes).

• FTC investigation of OpenAIUS · 2023 · ongoing
  Federal Trade Commission v. OpenAI — Civil Investigative Demand alleging consumer-protection violations: misleading claims about ChatGPT capabilities, training-data privacy, and consumer harm from hallucinations.
  Lesson: First US federal enforcement action against a frontier-AI developer. Establishes that pre-AI-statute consumer-protection authority (FTC §5) can be applied to AI services — supports the US 'sectoral / ex-post liability' regime (vs EU's ex-ante AIA). Action remains pending; no judgment yet.
  Source record →news secondary
• New York Times v. OpenAI + MicrosoftUS · 2023 · ongoing
  New York Times Company (private civil litigation) v. OpenAI Inc. + Microsoft Corp. — Unauthorised reproduction of NYT-copyrighted articles in GPT training corpora; output of substantially similar text on prompted query; removal of copyright-management information.
  Lesson: First major frontier-foundation-model copyright lawsuit by a primary news source. Discovery has surfaced disclosure of training-data composition that the EU AIA Art. 53 transparency requirements would have surfaced ex-ante. The case is the highest-stakes ex-post-liability action testing whether US sectoral approach can substitute for ex-ante regulation on training-data rights — outcome will inform 2025-2027 regulatory debates.
  Source record →
• Mobley v. Workday (US AI-hiring class action)US · 2023 · ongoing
  Mobley v. Workday, Inc., No. 3:23-cv-00770 (N.D. Cal.)
  Private civil class action; EEOC amicus participation v. Workday Inc. — Workday's algorithmic hiring tools allegedly screened out applicants on disability, age, and race. Class action seeks to certify Workday as an 'employment agency' under Title VII so disparate-impact theory applies to the algorithm's outputs rather than only its developers.
  Lesson: First major US AI-hiring class action with EEOC amicus support. If Workday is certified as an 'employment agency', US sectoral approach (EEOC + Title VII) substantially expands AI-hiring liability without requiring an AI statute. This is the load-bearing test of whether US 'principles + ex-post liability' approach can substitute for EU AIA Annex III §4 (high-risk employment AI obligations).
  Source record →regulator landing
• EEOC v. iTutorGroup (AI age-discrimination consent decree)US · 2022–2023
  EEOC v. iTutorGroup, Inc., No. 1:22-cv-02565 (E.D.N.Y.)
  Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) v. iTutorGroup, Inc. — iTutorGroup's recruiting software automatically rejected female applicants aged 55 and older, and male applicants aged 60 and older, regardless of qualifications.
  Lesson: First US EEOC-as-party suit against an AI-mediated hiring tool resolved by consent decree ($365,000 settlement + 5-year monitoring; required revised non-discriminatory application processes; mandatory anti-discrimination training; right to re-apply for rejected applicants). Establishes that pre-AI civil-rights statutes (ADEA, Title VII, ADA) can be applied to algorithmic hiring outputs without requiring a dedicated AI statute — the load-bearing precedent for the US 'sectoral / ex-post liability' regime in employment AI.
  Source record →regulator landing
• HUD / DOJ v. Facebook (ad-targeting Fair Housing Act)US · 2018–2022
  US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) + Department of Justice (DOJ) v. Meta Platforms, Inc. (Facebook) — Facebook's ad-delivery and ad-targeting tools (including 'Special Ad Audience' / Lookalike Audiences) allowed advertisers to exclude users on the basis of protected classes (race, colour, religion, sex, familial status, national origin, disability), and the platform's algorithmic delivery further skewed ad reach.
  Lesson: First major US federal settlement holding a platform liable for discriminatory algorithmic delivery under a pre-AI civil-rights statute. DOJ settlement (June 2022) required Meta to develop a new 'Variance Reduction System' to redress racially-skewed ad delivery + sunset the Special Ad Audience tool. Establishes that algorithmic-delivery discrimination — not just user-facing targeting options — is reachable under FHA. Subsequently cited as the template for analogous reasoning under ECOA (lending) and ADEA (employment).
  Source record →regulator landing

Cross-jurisdiction comparison

How peer instruments treat the topics Executive Order 14110 on Safe, Secure, Trustworthy AI governs.

°= industry self-imposed voluntary framework. Comparing a voluntary code's "governs" tint with a binding regulation's "governs" tint flattens the legal-force distinction; use the instrument-page banner for the operative status of each.

How to cite this article

Policy Window. (2023). Executive Order 14110 on Safe, Secure, Trustworthy AI [Wiki article — Instrument]. https://policywindow.org/wiki/us-eo-14110

Policy Window. 2023. "Executive Order 14110 on Safe, Secure, Trustworthy AI." Wiki article (Instrument). https://policywindow.org/wiki/us-eo-14110.

@misc{policywindow-us-eo-14110,
  title  = {Executive Order 14110 on Safe, Secure, Trustworthy AI},
  author = {Policy Window},
  year   = {2023},
  howpublished = {Exec. Order No. 14110, 88 Fed. Reg. 75191 (Nov. 1, 2023)},
  url    = {https://policywindow.org/wiki/us-eo-14110},
  note   = {Primary source: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/11/01/2023-24283/safe-secure-and-trustworthy-development-and-use-of-artificial-intelligence}
}

Related debates — rival interpretations & counterevidence

Structured controversies where this instrument's provisions are the locus of disagreement. Each debate page lays out the competing positions with primary-source citations.

• Pause AI vs Accelerate Capabilities — Should the global community impose temporary or capability-conditional pauses on frontier-AI development, or should development accelerate with safety work conducted in parallel?
• Pre-Deployment Red-Team vs Post-Deployment Audit — Should AI capability + safety evaluations happen primarily before deployment (red-team gating release), or primarily after (post-deployment audit + incident response)?
• Risk-Based vs Principles-Based vs Ex-Post Liability Regimes — Should AI governance work via (a) risk-based ex-ante categorisation + obligations (EU), (b) high-level principles delegated to sector regulators (UK / OECD / G7), or (c) ex-post liability + civil litigation (US sectoral)?
• Compute vs Behavioural Capability Thresholds — Should the regulatory trigger for 'frontier' / 'foundation' / 'systemic-risk' status be training-compute thresholds (objective + ex-ante observable), or behavioural-capability evaluation (more semantically meaningful but operationally costly)?

Related instruments

• EU AI Act · EU
• Interim Measures for Generative AI Service Management · CN
• G7 Hiroshima AI Process Code of Conduct · G7
• Council of Europe Framework Convention on AI · council_of_europe
• Bletchley Declaration on AI Safety · global
• Seoul Declaration on Safe, Innovative and Inclusive AI · global
• NIST AI RMF Generative AI Profile · US
• California SB-1047: Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier AI Models Act · US
• Brazil AI Bill (PL 2338/2023) · BR
• Anthropic Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP) v2 · US
• OpenAI Preparedness Framework · US
• Google DeepMind Frontier Safety Framework · US
• Meta Frontier AI Framework · US
• White House Voluntary AI Commitments · US
• Singapore Model AI Governance Framework for Generative AI · SG