Will Trump's deregulation of AI trigger a global race to the bottom for worker protections?

Throughout Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, he promised to repeal Joe Biden’s AI executive order, proclaiming that deregulation is the best course. With his victory, the reality of his AI plans could desecrate what’s left of the safety net protecting workers from exploitation.

At a campaign rally in December 2023, US President-elect Donald Trump demonstrated his disdain for President Joe Biden’s AI executive order, declaring that he would, in fact, repeal the order on day one of his presidential commencement.

“When I’m re-elected, I will cancel Biden’s artificial intelligence executive order and ban the use of AI to censor the speech of American citizens on day one,” Trump said.

This was reinforced in a Republican Party outline of its key policies, which stated that Trump would “repeal Joe Biden’s dangerous executive order that hinders AI innovation and imposes radical leftwing ideas on the development of this technology”.

Biden’s executive order includes a number of set safety and privacy standards for AI, with the goal being to ensure ethical usage. There is a key paragraph that expresses support for workers, which includes ensuring that principles and practices are developed to mitigate the harms AI poses, such as job security, data collection, health and safety, and labour standards.

With Trump returning for his second term, his vehement disagreement with Biden’s order displays a clear intent to ramp up deregulation in the AI space. There are, however, a number of intertwined motivations for this move to pull back AI regulation, a move that even Trump’s staunchest sycophant, Elon Musk, previously fought against.

In the past, Musk has been a stalwart in advancing the need for AI regulation, professing that a dystopian-like future will be on the near horizon if regulations are not implemented. However, with major donors of Trump’s campaign likening AI regulation to communism and the rising stakes of the US-China AI race, Musk’s “revered” opinion may be disregarded.

Trump’s win ‘a boot off the throat’

Silicon Valley investors, major Trump donors, and deregulation enthusiasts Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz struggled to contain their relief and excitement after Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris in the 2024 US presidential campaign. With each donating a reported US$2.5 million to Trump’s campaign, the pair expressed that it felt like “a boot off the throat”, fawning over potential projects as AI regulation unravels.

Dr Olivier Jutel, lecturer at the University of Otago, spoke to HR Leader about the effect that Andreessen and Horowitz’s zealous hatred for AI regulation may have on Trump’s decisions going forward.

“It’s no overstatement to say that Donald Trump’s campaign was fueled by the most radical players in Silicon Valley who champion total deregulation. There was a significant rallying of crypto and AI enthusiasts and venture capitalists to his cause. The largest spender in this electoral cycle was the Fairshake super crypto PAC that was essentially aimed at gutting securities regulation,” Jutel said.

“On AI specifically, two of the loudest supporters in tech for Donald Trump were Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm a16z. They both reportedly contributed [US]$2.5 million of their personal wealth to a pro-Trump text super PAC ‘Right For America’. Andreessen is a radical accelerationist; he’s written the ‘techno-optimist manifesto’ and ‘Why AI Will Save the World’.

“Behind his wild claims of stupendous wealth that will be showered down on everybody is the basic premise that ethics and regulation in tech are synonymous with total communism. These are people that are incredibly hostile to any notion of the public good, and they are committed ideologically to accelerating their own self-interest in AI above all else.”

Trump has portrayed his need to deregulate under the guise of freeing innovation from the shackles that AI regulation poses. This is a notion shared by many in the pro-deregulation space, claiming it hinders innovation, which manifests the threat of losing the AI race to China.

“What they tout as innovation is basically regulatory arbitrage. That is removing existing laws and protections and then capturing some elements of the public good and being able to charge monopoly rent profits,” Jutel said.

“What’s remarkable about AI thus far is the actual failures in productivity growth and really the failures of innovation. The reason workers hate using this stuff, in addition to the threats to their livelihood, is that it just simply doesn’t do what the tech blowhards say it does.”

What a lack of AI regulation means for workers

As the technocrats and oligarchs collectively ensure AI regulation dissipates, the flow-on effect to workers who don’t fit into the financial parameters to reap the benefits of such deregulation may be disastrous.

Although the Albanese government has held a rather strong position on AI, including their mandatory guardrails for AI in high-risk settings, if Trump and the US do indeed follow through with a regulation rollback, it could set a new precedent for fellow nations to consider something similar.

On the ground level in Australia, AI continues to be implemented into various workplace systems to drive productivity and business outcomes. In its purity, one of the benefits of AI implementation is that it can offer relief from the rather monotonous and repetitive tasks that workers endure – freeing up time for a workers skillset to better flourish.

Despite this, and the other benefits AI may offer, there are still a number of concerns about the issues that artificial intelligence can create in the workplace alone. For example, AI bias and algorithmic biases in the recruitment space have been a well-reported issue, with discrimination cases being brought forward on behalf of candidates who were disregarded from jobs on the basis of their race.

Theft of work is yet another issue that has been well reported. At the recent Australian Halloween special debate, titled “Artificial Intelligence at Work – Trick or Treat?”, journalist David Marr himself shared a personal account of his work being used to train AI models without his consent.

“I’ve been scrapped … This is theft,” Marr said. He went on to state that there is an urgent need for both an ethical and legal framework that can protect workers from similar contraventions.

Above all else, the concern that most workers resonate with is that of job security. At the same debate, Liam O’Brien, assistant secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), painted two contrasting scenarios. He highlighted a future where AI can either empower workers or become “a grim reaper in search of jobs to destroy”.

In a reality where the most powerful nation in the world is eroding AI regulation to drive “innovation”, secure new projects, and beat China, the latter of O’Brien’s scenarios becomes far more likely for workers in the US, and perhaps, eventually, in the Land Down Under.