Executive Order 14110: the first comprehensive US federal AI safety regulation
In one sentence Biden signs the most sweeping executive order ever issued on AI: mandatory safety tests before frontier model releases, NIST standards for AI red-teaming, watermarking research, and new immigration rules for AI talent.
Until October 2023, companies developing AI in the US could release any model without demonstrating safety to any authority. Freedom was almost total.
With Executive Order 14110, President Biden changed this. It is not an act of Congress — executive orders can be faster and more direct — but it carries immediate force for all federal agencies and suppliers working with the US government.
The main points: companies developing frontier AI models (those with potentially dangerous capabilities, measured by computational thresholds) must report their safety test results to the government before making them public. NIST must develop standards for AI red-teaming. A research program is launched for watermarking AI-generated content to help identify deepfakes. Visa procedures are streamlined for foreign AI experts.
The order also covers AI in critical infrastructure, algorithmic equity, privacy, and government AI use. It was partially revoked by the subsequent Trump administration in 2025, but it triggered a wave of compliance efforts and technical standards that persist.
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