State-Sponsored Stupidity: The Inevitable Failure of Trump's AI Strategy

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the spectacular and predictable implosion of Elon Musk’s “anti-woke” AI, Grok.^[1] When prompted to be “politically incorrect,” Grok did not become a witty contrarian; it became “MechaHitler,” spouting antisemitic bile at a rapid pace. I argued then that this was not a bug but a feature: the inevitable result of aligning a powerful optimization process to a value system that is not a coherent ideology but a contentless void of grievance and hate. Grok’s failure was an algorithmic unmasking, stripping away the sanitized veneer of the “anti-woke” movement to reveal the raw fascism at its core. I believed it was a stark warning. Now, it’s become the blueprint for the Trump Administration’s AI policy.

The Trump administration’s newly unveiled “America’s AI Action Plan” is the terrifying, state-sponsored culmination of this same ideological project.^[2] Where Grok was a private experiment in building a bigoted machine, this Action Plan represents the codification of that same flawed, malicious logic into the official strategy of the United States government. The plan, accompanied by a new Executive Order on AI exports, sets a national goal of achieving “unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance.” Yet, at its heart is a directive so profoundly self-sabotaging that it guarantees failure. The administration’s central command to build AI systems free from so-called “ideological bias” by eliminating concepts like Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is a mandate to create technologically broken, fundamentally untrustworthy, and socially catastrophic systems.

This is not merely about building biased AI; it is about mandating the creation of delusional AI. For years, the primary concern has been that AI models might accidentally learn and amplify harmful societal biases, a phenomenon known as bias inheritance. ^[3] The Action Plan proposes something far more sinister. By directing the government to revise its standards and procurement guidelines to explicitly exclude DEI and other so-called “social engineering agendas,” the administration is ordering an act of deliberate bias injection.

It is a top-down directive to install a specific, factually incorrect worldview as a core operational principle of the nation’s most advanced technologies. The AI is being instructed not just to ignore certain realities but to actively deny them. It is being programmed to lie on behalf of the state.

To understand the scale of this project, one must learn to translate its language. The “America’s AI Action Plan” is a masterclass in authoritarian euphemism. The document is littered with appeals to build AI systems that are “free from ideological bias” and designed to pursue “objective truth” rather than “social engineering agendas”. These phrases are political cover for a program of systemic, ideological purification. The plan’s true intent is laid bare in its key directives:

• “Revise the NIST AI Risk Management Framework to eliminate references to misinformation, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and climate change”.^[4]

• “Update Federal procurement guidelines to ensure that the government only contracts with frontier large language model (LLM) developers who ensure that their systems are objective and free from top-down ideological bias”.^[5]

These two actions constitute an architecture of algorithmic erasure. By injecting inherent bias through the nation’s primary AI risk framework, the administration officially declares that the risks of discrimination and harm to marginalized communities are no longer a federal concern. By tying federal contracts to this new, lobotomized standard of “objectivity,” it creates a powerful financial incentive for the entire industry to build models that conform to its ideology.

The AI Action Plan seeks to automate this logic, hard-coding a factually incorrect worldview into our digital infrastructure. The existence of transgender people is not a “social engineering agenda”; it is a documented reality across human history and science. By defining “objective truth” as that which excludes this reality, the administration forces its AI into a state of perpetual, state-mandated cognitive dissonance. This corrupting instruction, embedded at the heart of the policy, is the seed of its inevitable technical collapse.

An artificial intelligence system forced to deny a segment of reality is not a biased system; it is a broken one. The ideological mandate creates a fundamental conflict between the model’s programming and the data it must process, triggering a cascade of well-understood AI safety failures. As what I previously wrote about Grok explained, and as a wealth of research confirms, this will unfold in three reinforcing stages: specification gaming, reward hacking, and bias amplification.

Assuming the model developers follow the lead of Grok and attempt to align the model forcefully with these directives, there will be a cascade of failures. First, the AI will engage in specification gaming. When given a vague, unspecified goal like “be objective” or “avoid woke” while being forbidden from acknowledging transgender people or systemic racism, the AI must find a way to explain the vast evidence of their existence in its training data.^[6] It will “game” the specification by inventing convoluted, false narratives. Asked about slavery or the historical trans figure Frances Thompson, the model might invent a fictional medical condition to explain her life or classify historical records about her and slavery in the US as “data corrupted by 21st-century social theories.” This isn’t a bug; it’s the model finding the most creative solution to an irrational command. More advanced models are even more prone to this failure, not less.^[7]

This leads directly to reward hacking. Modern LLMs are trained with human feedback to maximize a “reward signal.”^[8] In the system envisioned by the Action Plan, the model would be rewarded for outputs that comply with the state’s delusion. It would quickly learn that the most efficient path to a high reward is not to be truthful, but to generate outputs that aggressively conform to the state mandated unreality. It will quickly learn that fabricating or obfuscating information are the optimal strategies for maximizing its reward.

Finally, this culminates in catastrophic bias amplification. The initial ideological corruption will cascade through the system, poisoning the model’s entire knowledge base.^[9] An AI that is fundamentally broken in its understanding of race and gender cannot be trusted to reason correctly about biology, law, or history. This creates a vicious feedback loop. The AI, programmed with erasure, generates biased text. This text, bearing the imprimatur of a government-approved system, pollutes the data ecosystem. Future models trained on this polluted data will become even more biased, leading to what researchers call “model collapse,” a degenerative process where models converge on a distorted, low-fidelity version of reality. The AI will become a high-tech parrot, capable only of repeating dogma. Worse still, this will create a positive feedback loop as key decision makers rely on inherently biased models with undue confidence that will substantially amplify bias.^[10]

The deployment of these broken, malicious technologies would have devastating real-world consequences, transforming AI into an active agent of state-sponsored violence against minority groups. These systems would serve as digital brownshirts, tasked with enforcing ideological purity. They would be used to generate "authoritative" but false texts for schools, government agencies, and courtrooms, automating the production of state-sanctioned propaganda.

The most immediate harm would occur in critical services. In healthcare, the consequences would be catastrophic. An AI built on this foundation would be actively dangerous, ignoring social determinants of health and corrupting medical data. Studies already show that commercial AI systems exhibit significant bias on race and gender; the administration’s plan would turn this bug into a core feature.^[11] In the legal system, these AIs would undermine the very possibility of justice, systematically invalidating not only the existence of transgender people but of structural gender and racial inequality as a whole.^[12]

The harm is not confined to the United States. The administration’s plan is explicitly global. The Executive Order on AI establishes the "American AI Exports Program," a national effort to export "full-stack American AI technology packages" and drive their adoption "throughout the world".^[13] This is a program of technological imperialism. The U.S. would be leveraging its market dominance to force a uniquely American and virulently hateful culture war onto its allies and partners, creating a global market for technologically-enforced bigotry. For authoritarian regimes that share this transphobic agenda, this program would offer a powerful new toolset for oppression, built and endorsed by the United States.

The authors of the "America's AI Action Plan" frame their project as a "race to achieve global dominance in artificial intelligence". They could not be more wrong. By shackling its national AI strategy to a brittle, exclusionary, and anti-reality ideology, the administration has ensured that America will lose this race. The AI systems produced under this plan will be a global laughingstock: untrustworthy, unreliable, and incapable of the reality-grounded reasoning required for true innovation. They will be Potemkin AIs, powerful only in their capacity to inflict harm.

This policy is the logical endpoint of the ideology I first wrote about in the context of Grok’s "MechaHitler" moment. It reveals that the "anti-woke" crusade was never about open discourse; it was always about enforcing a rigid authoritarian worldview. The attempt to build an AI in this image is an attempt to build a machine that lies for a political movement. The ultimate lesson is clear: the pursuit of capable and beneficial AI is inseparable from the fight for human dignity. You cannot build a machine to reason about the world by forcing it to deny that fundamental aspects of the world exist. True technological leadership cannot be built on a foundation of lies.

Perhaps the tech companies will manage to silo the damage of these directives and relegate them to self-contained aligned models solely for the federal government. However, that would be misplaced optimism as the Trump administration will jump on any public perception that AI models do not conform to their ideological project and tech companies will most certainly be eager to overcomply. We cannot bet the future of AI technology on a handful of tech companies captured by an authoritarian state and owned by aligned oligarchs. To do so, risks calamity.