Trump delays executive order on AI oversight hours before planned signing

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President Donald Trump on Thursday said he had decided to postpone signing a highly anticipated AI executive order, after the White House had sent out invitations to executives from leading tech companies.

“I didn’t like what I was seeing,” Trump told reporters.

The executive order was slated to create a system for the federal government to vet powerful new artificial intelligence models before they are released publicly, in an attempt to shore up computer networks as officials race to counter emerging cyberthreats. It would mark a shift in strategy for an administration that has championed a hands-off approach to the technology.

Trump’s comments create uncertainty about how the administration will respond to a new breed of AI models, like Anthropic’s Mythos, that have been shown to be adept at finding security flaws in computer code and coming up with ways to exploit them. Some of Trump’s political supporters have sought an even more stringent, mandatory review process amid a growing backlash to AI that has divided the administration.

The White House notified companies that the event was delayed on Thursday, a day after invitations went out to executives, according to one person familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the communications. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“I didn’t like certain aspects of it, I postponed it,” Trump told reporters. “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. We have a very substantial … on AI, it’s causing – it’s causing tremendous good, and it’s also bringing in a lot of jobs, tremendous numbers of jobs. Again, we have more people working right now than we’ve ever had. I really thought that could have been a blocker. And I want to make sure that it’s not.”

The White House had invited executives from major AI labs to the event – including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who had feuded with the Trump administration this year over limitations on the Pentagon’s use of Anthropic’s software. Many of the executives who were invited are based in California and had little advance notice to plan travel to Washington.

Under the planned order, companies would voluntarily provide the government with an early look at frontier AI systems – up to 90 days before public release – so agencies could test the models for dangerous capabilities, identify vulnerabilities, and prepare defenses before hackers or foreign adversaries could exploit them, according to a summary of the planned order and two people briefed on the plans.

Matt Pearl, a former official in President Joe Biden‘s administration who handled emerging technologies, said the draft had signaled that the administration is taking AI threats “much more seriously than they were.”

“They’re providing a framework by which the U.S. government is going to more robustly review AI models,” he said.

The government would like to gain access to the AI models up to 90 days before they are released to the public. But some White House officials and companies have resisted agreeing to a timeline that could slow the release of the technology, said two people briefed on the plans, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the fluid discussions.

Some details of the plan were still under discussion Wednesday, but companies were expected to commit to give the government a roughly two-week advance look at the models, one person said.

The draft order also would elevate the intelligence community’s role in assessing AI systems. The National Security Agency would play a key part in determining which new models would need government scrutiny, according to the summary. The administration envisions the Treasury Department working with the AI industry to serve as a hub for finding vulnerabilities and distributing fixes.

The order was also expected to direct the government to surge hiring of cybersecurity and AI professionals in the wake of significant cuts to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, whose mission is to help safeguard the nation’s critical infrastructure against growing cyberthreats.

A surge in cybersecurity hiring would provide “a Band-Aid on a self-inflicted hemorrhage,” Pearl said.

“It will – at most – partially address the attrition that key agencies experience following cuts and losing staff due to morale issues,” Pearl said. “That said, it does demonstrate that the administration now recognizes that having a skilled workforce in this area is critical.”

Evaluating these systems for cyber-risks “isn’t trivial,” said Vinh Nguyen, a former NSA cyber and AI expert who is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It requires deep frontier-AI expertise, elite cyber talent and the capability to adjust the benchmarks as the technology advances. And the talent to do this work is extremely limited.”

Other AI policy experts said the order, while a welcome first step, falls short in one key respect.

“What’s needed are actual regulations that provide clarity” on what risks the United States is testing for and who the models can be shared with, said Chris McGuire, a former White House tech policy aide in the Biden administration who is also a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“This is a very risky strategy that depends on companies willingly providing information to the government,” he said.

Trump’s return to the White House was heavily funded by tech industry leaders who argued that the Biden administration’s approach to AI regulation was too heavy-handed. In his early weeks in office, Trump overturned the Biden administration’s landmark AI executive order, which required tech companies to notify the government when they were building advanced models and share their safety evaluations with the Commerce Department.

Advocates for greater regulation are hopeful that Trump’s executive order could provide a blueprint for Congress to create a mandatory process.

The drafting of the order caused a split within the administration as some officials sought to hand more responsibility for overseeing AI to intelligence agencies and sideline an institute focused on the technology housed in the Commerce Department. At the same time, a senior adviser to the president raised alarms in the tech industry when he described the plans as akin to how the Food and Drug Administration oversees new medicines, prompting fears that it would result in burdensome regulation.

The White House briefed representatives this week from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, xAI and industry trade groups on the contents of the executive order.

Vice President JD Vance said Tuesday that the White House is trying to strike a balance as it responds to the new risks.

“Artificial intelligence could be great, it could help us find cures to diseases that currently people are dying from or suffering from,” Vance said. “It also does have some downsides, and we’re trying to balance that safety against innovation, and we think that we’ve got the right balance here in the Trump administration.”

The administration appeared to have found an appropriately tailored response, said Neil Chilson, the head of AI policy at the Abundance Institute, which has advocated for a voluntary approach to government evaluations of AI.

“This is directed toward a very specific type of harm. It is a pretty moderate approach to it,” said Chilson, who served as the Federal Trade Commission’s acting chief technologist during the first Trump administration. “It is not a gatekeeping or licensing arrangement that is anything like an FDA-style regime.”

Anthropic announced in early April that it would not release its new Mythos model to the public because of the risks it would pose if hackers used it. Instead Anthropic partnered with major companies so they could use the technology to fix their systems. Rival lab OpenAI soon announced that its latest model had similarly powerful capabilities.

The tools can identify long-overlooked security holes, and reviews by the British government have found they are able to carry out the kind of attacks previously limited to experienced hackers.

But the people whose job it is to write software and protect computer networks can also make use of the same abilities to patch systems, and some experts think they will ultimately come out on top.

While the latest models have raised potential cybersecurity risks, experts predict that AI is going to continue rapidly gaining power.

Helen Toner, interim director of Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, said the government should be building its own technical expertise now in preparation.

“That would be a more strategic approach,” said Toner, a former OpenAI board member. “You need an approach that can be flexible and adapt to how these systems are changing.”

Cat Zakrzewski is a White House reporter for The Washington Post. Ellen Nakashima is an intelligence and national security reporter at The Washington Post. Ian Duncan is a reporter covering federal transportation agencies and the politics of transportation. 

Cleve R. Wootson Jr. contributed to this report.