US to require AI vendors to measure political bias to sell LLMs to federal agencies

Summary

The Trump administration is tightening procurement rules for generative AI: vendors will need to measure and report political “bias” in large language models to be eligible for U.S. federal sales (with national security systems carved out). The move operationalizes earlier direction to avoid buying AI systems the administration frames as ideologically “woke,” and it effectively turns bias measurement into a gatekeeping compliance requirement for major government contracts. Practically, this raises the bar for model evaluation tooling and documentation, and could nudge vendors toward more standardized test suites (or at least defensible methodologies) for neutrality, factuality, and “truth-seeking.” The bigger impact is market-shaping: the U.S. government is a huge customer, so procurement checklists often become de facto industry standards—especially for enterprise deployments that mirror federal requirements. Expect a second-order fight over definitions (what counts as bias, which benchmarks, and how to prevent the metric from becoming performative).