Trump Pulls Back Planned AI Executive Order After Last-Minute Industry Lobbying

President Donald Trump abruptly postponed the signing of a draft executive order on artificial intelligence on May 22, citing concerns that its provisions could impede U.S. competitiveness against China. The order had been expected to address the federal government's approach to AI, building on the administration's broader AI advancement efforts, but Trump announced the delay during an unrelated Oval Office event. A signing ceremony had been scheduled for Thursday afternoon, with technology executives expected at the White House. Trump did not identify the specific provisions he opposed. "Because I didn't like certain aspects of it, I postponed it," Trump told reporters, adding, "I think it gets in the way of, you know, we're leading China, we're leading everybody, and I don't want to do anything that's going to get in the way of that lead."

The shelved order would have created a voluntary pre-release review framework for frontier AI models. The order would have created a voluntary framework for AI developers to engage with the U.S. government before the public release of advanced AI models, according to two sources familiar with the order. It would have directed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the Office of the National Cyber Director, and the Office of Science and Technology Policy to establish methods to determine which AI models fell under the new testing regime, and then charged administration officials with creating a framework for the government to evaluate yet-to-be-released models in conjunction with leading AI companies. A draft of the order contained explicit limiting language: "Nothing in this section shall be construed to authorize the creation of a mandatory governmental licensing, preclearance, or permitting requirement for the development, publication, release, or distribution of new AI models, including frontier models." The proposal would have allowed the government to vet national security risks in advanced AI models before public release through voluntary collaboration with companies including Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google, according to the Associated Press.

The proximate cause of the postponement was a last-minute intervention by David Sacks, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist who formerly served as Trump's special adviser for AI and crypto. Thursday's postponement came after Sacks voiced industry concerns about the measure to Trump, according to a senior White House official and two people familiar with the matter. Sacks' 11th-hour intervention came even though he had been briefed about the directive in recent days. According to the White House official, Sacks had participated in a review of the order earlier in the week and officials believed he was broadly supportive. But on Wednesday night he began raising concerns, including fears that the voluntary review structure could one day become mandatory. "Then, he called POTUS this morning unbeknownst to anybody, his own staff included, and derailed it," the White House official said. The Washington Post reported a broader account: last-minute calls from Sacks, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg together convinced the president not to sign. Musk denied the account on X, writing: "This is false. I still don't know what was in that executive order and the President only spoke to me after declining to sign." Separately, four people familiar with the planning said the delay was also due in part to the fact that several leading tech CEOs invited on short notice could not attend, with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta all expected to send lower-level executives in their place.

The draft order was catalyzed in part by the debut of Anthropic's Mythos model. The order's planned debut came less than two months after Anthropic's Mythos Preview model demonstrated the novel ability to autonomously discover thousands of severe and critical cyber vulnerabilities, including in leading operating systems and web browsers. Anthropic has voluntarily limited Mythos' release out of concern that those capabilities, if widely shared, could help facilitate attacks against critical infrastructure. In the interim, the Trump administration has continued to exercise a kind of ad hoc arrangement for that one model: Anthropic has shared Mythos with the U.S. government and, under what Anthropic calls Project Glasswing, with a select handful of U.S. technology companies and financial institutions whose software underpins critical infrastructure. Some industry officials separately questioned why the Treasury Department would play a prominent role in coordinating responses to AI security vulnerabilities under the proposed order, arguing that agencies such as CISA and the National Institute of Standards and Technology have traditionally taken the lead in that area.

The postponement sits within a broader arc of administration AI policy that has consistently subordinated oversight to competitive positioning. Trump rescinded Biden's comprehensive AI Executive Order 14110 within hours of assuming office on Jan. 20, 2025. Biden's order had laid out its own method for establishing which AI models were considered most advanced or highest risk and, unlike the Trump draft, required leading AI companies to share the results of internal testing, security protocols, and other development details. On Jan. 23, 2025, Trump issued an executive order titled "Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence," which assigned select advisers to coordinate with federal agency heads to develop an action plan to "sustain and enhance America's global AI dominance" within 180 days. The now-delayed order would have represented the administration's first concrete attempt to establish a pre-release security review process, albeit a voluntary one. Notably, Trump ally Steve Bannon and more than 60 other conservative leaders had sent a letter to the president urging him to sign the executive order while calling for more government oversight of frontier AI models. As of publication, the White House had set no date for a rescheduled signing, and the specific revisions under consideration remain undisclosed [POLITICO].