Executive Order 14110 set thresholds and was later rescinded

A reporting duty tied to a compute threshold

President Biden signed Executive Order 14110, 'Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence,' on 30 October 2023. Its text, preserved at the Biden White House archive, used the Defense Production Act to require companies to report to the federal government when training a dual-use foundation model using more than 10^26 integer or floating-point operations of compute, or a biological-sequence-focused model above 10^23 operations, and to report acquisition of computing clusters above a stated capacity threshold. This reporting duty applied to the largest training runs of the time, not to AI development generally.

What the order directed agencies to build

Beyond reporting, the order gave NIST 270 days to produce several deliverables: guidelines for safe and trustworthy AI development, a companion resource extending the AI Risk Management Framework to generative AI, secure-development guidance for dual-use foundation models, and benchmarks for evaluating dangerous capabilities including in cybersecurity and biosecurity, alongside guidelines for AI red-teaming. These were instructions to an agency to produce guidance on a deadline, not the guidance itself; the order set the clock running rather than supplying the content.

Rescission, and what survived it

On 20 January 2025, a new administration issued an order titled 'Initial Rescissions of Harmful Executive Orders and Actions,' which the text names as rescinding 'Executive Order 14110 of October 30, 2023,' among a longer list of prior-administration orders, without giving a rationale specific to the AI order. The reporting duty and the underlying legal basis for it lapsed with the rescission. What did not disappear is the agency work already completed under the order's deadline: NIST's Generative AI Profile, called for under the order and published in July 2024 as noted on its framework page, remained available after the rescission, because a published technical document does not require the order that commissioned it to stay in force.

• Is a given piece of AI guidance still legally required, or does it merely still exist because nobody withdrew the document itself?
• Did a compliance programme built around the compute-reporting threshold continue voluntarily after January 2025, or was it dropped along with the legal duty?
• What other guidance is downstream of an order that could itself be rescinded, and does its practical value depend on the order remaining in force?

The fifteen-month lifespan of the order is a reminder that executive orders are a comparatively fast and reversible policy instrument; a technical deliverable produced under one can outlast it, but the legal duty that triggered the deliverable does not.