Skip to content
Source · Daily Brief

AI Daily Brief — 23 January 2025

Thursday rewrote US AI policy and launched the year’s first headline agentic-AI product. Trump signed Executive Order 14179, “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence,” revoking Biden’s October 2023 Safe AI EO and ordering a 180-day national AI Action Plan. OpenAI released Operator, an autonomous browser-using agent powered by the new Computer-Using Agent (CUA) model. At Davos, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei told the room that AI would replace all software developers within a year and 50% of white-collar jobs within five — explicitly calling for stronger regulation just hours after the most deregulatory AI EO in US history.

Top stories

  • Trump signs EO 14179 “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in AI.” The order revokes Biden’s EO 14110 and tasks the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, the Special Advisor for AI and Crypto (David Sacks), and the APNSA with delivering a national AI Action Plan within 180 days — focused on “human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security.” OMB has 60 days to revise memoranda M-24-10 and M-24-18. The Action Plan deadline lands July 22, 2025. via White House · via Wikipedia
  • OpenAI launches Operator — a research-preview autonomous browser-using agent. Powered by the new Computer-Using Agent (CUA) model combining GPT-4o vision with reasoning, Operator controls its own browser to type, click, and scroll through tasks like filling forms or ordering groceries. Initially rolled out to US ChatGPT Pro ($200/mo) subscribers; Plus, Team, Enterprise tiers to follow. via OpenAI · via MIT Tech Review
  • Sam Altman endorses EO 14179. Altman on X: “The U.S. should lead on AI by continuing to develop the very best models, making sure they’re safe, and getting cyber tools into the hands of trusted defenders. The new EO gets the balance right.” Chris Lehane separately called the order “an important step forward.” via The Hill
  • Dario Amodei at Davos warns 50% of white-collar jobs gone in 5 years. Anthropic’s CEO told the WEF audience that AI would replace all software developers’ work within a year, reach “Nobel-level” research in multiple fields within two, and that 50% of white-collar jobs would disappear within five years — explicitly calling for stronger regulation giving government narrow authority to block unsafe deployments. via Bloomberg
  • Davos AGI panel: Hassabis, Amodei, LeCun split. Hassabis put AGI odds at roughly 50% within the decade but said today’s LLM architectures alone won’t get there; LeCun reinforced the architectural-limits view; Amodei talked timelines. WEF 2025 theme: “Industries in the Intelligent Age.” via WEF

Who shipped

OpenAI‘s Operator was the lab release of the day. Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, and xAI made no dated launches but were heavily represented on Davos panels.

Money, infra & hardware

Microsoft’s clarification post-Stargate continued to ripple — confirmed as a key technology partner but not equity funder, with right of first refusal on future OpenAI cloud capacity. The Diffusion Rule sat in stasis as the new administration absorbed it; the rescission would land months later.

Open-source pulse

DeepSeek-R1 traction kept building. The model and its distilled variants were now the most discussed releases on Hugging Face; analysts highlighted the $6M training-cost claim that would, four days later, trigger NVIDIA’s largest single-session market-cap loss ever.

By the numbers

  • 180 days — EO 14179 AI Action Plan deadline (due July 22, 2025)
  • 60 days — OMB memo-revision window
  • $200/mo — Operator’s ChatGPT Pro launch tier
  • 50% — Amodei’s five-year white-collar job-loss prediction
  • Most-mentioned actor: Trump administration

Compiled by AI Feed’s editor from verified web sources for 23 January 2025.