Executive Order 14179, Removing Barriers to American Leadership in AI, signed

Executive Order 14179, Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence, was signed on 23 January 2025. It declared a national policy of sustaining and enhancing American global AI dominance and set out to revoke AI policies the administration saw as obstacles to innovation.

What it is

The order is brief: a purpose statement, a one-sentence policy tying AI dominance to human flourishing, economic competitiveness and national security, a definition borrowed from federal statute, and two operative sections. It became the reference point for later federal AI actions.

What it requires

Section 4 gave three White House officials, working with other advisers and agencies, 180 days to develop and submit an action plan for achieving the policy.

Section 5 ordered an immediate review of everything done under the revoked EO 14110. Agency heads were told to suspend, revise or rescind conflicting actions where the law allows, and the OMB Director received 60 days to rework memoranda M-24-10 and M-24-18.

Both directives produced documents. OMB announced revised AI memos on 7 April 2025, stating they were revised at the order's direction, and the White House released its AI Action Plan on 23 July 2025 with more than 90 federal policy actions across three pillars. A December 2025 order on state AI laws also opens by citing EO 14179.

What security leaders should do

• Follow the implementing actions in the AI Action Plan, since that is where this order's policy turns into concrete tasks for agencies and their suppliers.
• Re-baseline any roadmap built on EO 14110 deadlines; tasks tied to that order may have been suspended or rescinded under section 5.
• Keep AI security controls in place regardless of the policy shift, because the attacks those controls address did not change with the order.