The US AI executive order is gone. What changes for a Swiss company
Biden’s 2023 order was revoked on 20 January and replaced by a new one on 23 January. Directly: nothing. Indirectly: one thing worth a diary entry.
On 20 January 2025 the incoming administration revoked Executive Order 14110, the 2023 order on safe and trustworthy AI. On 23 January it issued a replacement, « Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence », with a markedly different emphasis: reducing regulatory obstacles rather than imposing testing and reporting duties.
Direct effect on you: none
A US executive order never applied to a Swiss company. Your obligations come from Swiss law, and where you touch the EU market, from the EU AI Act. Neither changed this week, and the 2 February deadline is unaffected.
Anyone selling you compliance services on the back of this news is selling you something you do not need.
Indirect effect: one thing to watch
The transatlantic data transfer framework. Your ability to use US services lawfully rests on an adequacy arrangement, and that arrangement depends on US oversight bodies and commitments remaining in place. It is an executive construction, and this week demonstrated how quickly executive constructions can be rewritten.
Nothing has been withdrawn. The framework stands today and your contracts are valid. But its durability is now visibly a political question, and a prudent company treats it as a dependency with a review date rather than as furniture.
The proportionate response
Not migration. Not alarm. One entry in your supplier file, per vendor that processes data in the United States:
- What legal basis carries the data there — adequacy, standard contractual clauses, or both.
- Whether the contract already falls back to standard contractual clauses if adequacy lapses, or whether that would need renegotiating.
- A review date. Mid-2025 is sensible.
Most large vendors have a good answer ready to the second question, because their lawyers have been thinking about this since 2020. Asking costs you an email.
The wider lesson
Two divergent regulatory directions are now visible: the EU codifying obligations on a fixed timetable, the US reducing them. Swiss companies sit between and trade with both.
That is not a problem to solve in January. It is a reason to keep your data paths written down, so that when one of those directions changes again you can answer the question in an afternoon rather than a quarter.