The Biden administration took another step today in Washington’s efforts to regulate new kinds of artificial intelligence.

President Biden signed a new executive order, taking something of a “whole of government” approach to reining in the mostly unregulated space with a slew of orders for executive agencies and requests and suggestions for the private sector.

This executive order attempts to set new standards for how we develop, test and use AI in government as well as within private industry.

Meredith Broussard is the author of a new book on AI and bias in tech, and teaches at NYU. She said this order is a very big deal. 

“What it says is that developers of the most powerful AI systems must share their safety test results and other critical information with the government,” she said.

They will also have to develop tools to ensure the AI systems are safe for consumers.

Whether or not the Biden administration can, without a law from Congress, force companies to do this is less clear.

Neil Chilson is a senior research fellow at the Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University.

“There’s some things that are probably within the presidential power, but are potentially questionable, calls for additional guidance,” he said. “Lots and lots of, ‘Hey, let’s use existing legal authorities to look at this.'”

Chilson said it will take months if not years for new regulations to come down the pipeline.

But in the meantime, AI is already helping make decisions affecting people’s lives.

Alexandra Reeve Givens is president and CEO of the Center for Democracy and Technology.

“If you’ve applied for a job lately, if you’ve applied for a loan, if you’ve applied to be approved for housing, if you’ve applied for public benefits, AI systems are being used in each of those moments,” she said.

Givens said one of the ways the Biden administration hopes to influence those systems is by updating the rules around the billions of dollars the federal government spends buying goods and services from the private sector.

“Now, if you’re a contractor trying to sell a system to the federal government… this is going to set kind of the new standards that you need to be able to prove you’re compliant with,” she said.

And when you’re talking that kind of money, that kind of influence can be rolled out a lot more quickly.