Forking the Future: America’s Bold New Plan to Win the AI Race… With a Muzzle

On July 23, 2025, the White House issued an Executive Order titled “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government”. The goal?
To make sure no federal chatbot dares to say anything that might make a senator uncomfortable at brunch.

Under this bold new initiative, the U.S. government will only use AI models that are ideologically neutral.

Which, in this context, means ideologically pre-approved — by the same people who think climate change is a hoax but climate-controlled golf carts are freedom.

So, what’s the problem?

Step One: Ask the Wrong Question

This EO doesn’t ask: “Is this model fast, accurate, or strategic?”

It asks:“Does it make Donny feel weird inside?”

Imagine evaluating your general during wartime based not on tactics, but on whether he includes enough disclaimers before using pronouns.

That’s where we are now. We’ve gone from “Can it help us win?” to “Can it quote the Founding Fathers without sounding like it read Ibram X. Kendi once by accident?”

AI Doesn’t Do Truth; It Does Possibility

Here’s the part they missed during the briefing (or skipped while tweeting):

Large language models don’t declare truth. They generate probability-weighted, context-shaped outputs based on patterns in human communication.

They’re jazz musicians, not court stenographers. They give you nuance, ambiguity, multiple angles — you know, like humans do.

So when you say “Make it neutral,” what you’re really saying is:“Make it flatter, dumber, and ideally afraid of its own voice across all possible output.”

Which is a hell of a policy for a tool designed to help us think faster.

Don’t Fork the Model. Fork the Headache.

Let’s be honest: developers aren’t going to build two beautiful parallel models.They’re going to build one real model — and then they’re going to bolt on a cursed, contract-compliant Frankenmodel that only exists so someone in procurement can sleep at night.

It will:

• Lag behind updates
• Break under pressure
• Require more testing than a SpaceX rocket
• And mostly exist to not say anything problematic like “gender exists” or “America had slavery once.”

And when it fails? They’ll say American AI can’t be trusted.

No — it just can’t be neutered and trusted at the same time.

CFOs, Strap In. This Is the Expensive Kind of Dumb

Every time the base model updates, the compliant version gets dumber — or more expensive. Testing has to be redone. Alignment has to be revalidated. RLHF becomes RLY-Hellish-Financially.

You’re asking engineers to tune for ideology instead of insight.
You’re asking QA teams to regression-test for vibes.
You’re asking your budget to double so you can ship the slow version of intelligence.

And somewhere in the back, a CFO is trying to decide whether to greenlight a GPU cluster or just retire early and become a goat farmer.

You Don’t Win a Race With a Ball and Chain

Global AI leadership isn’t a fashion show — it’s a sprint. And here’s America, lining up with ankle weights and a legal pad titled “Things the Model Can’t Say if It Wants a Government Contract.”

The other guys? They’re moving. Fast.

While we’re still fighting about whether the AI should be allowed to know that women exist in the workplace, they’re deploying systems that don’t care who gets offended — just who gets there first.

The Enemy Doesn’t Care if Your Model is “Woke”

This is the part where things stop being funny.

Because the first, most serious use of AI is military and defense. And this EO ensures that the version we deploy to national defense will be:

• Outdated
• Sanitized
• Politically fragile
• And tuned to soothe, not to see

When adversaries build models, they ask:“Will this help us win?”

When we build ours, we’re now told to ask:“Will this quote tweet badly?”

Let that sink in.

From Woke to Joke

Let’s be clear: the industry already has its hands full. Trying to balance fairness, privacy, safety, inclusion, public perception — that’s the job.

This EO doesn’t make that easier. It makes it dumber.

It replaces real governance with: “Does this response align with the emotional palette of a man who once tried to buy Greenland?”

That’s not neutrality. That’s personality cult compliance — enforced by redlines in Python.

Final Word: When the Future Forks, You’d Better Be Fast

This Executive Order doesn’t fix bias. It doesn’t create clarity. It doesn’t restore balance.

It breaks the architecture.

It tells developers to fork the codebase, burn the budget, and deploy the slow version of intelligence to the parts of government that need the sharpest tools possible.

And worst of all: it mistakes obedience for strength.

We can argue policy all day. But the enemy doesn’t care if your model is ideologically pleasing.

They care if it works.
And if yours doesn’t, you won’t need to debate it.
You’ll just fall behind — and you won’t get to catch up.