President Donald Trump called off plans to sign a new executive order on artificial intelligence hours before an expected White House ceremony, postponing the Oval Office event with tech industry executives after reviewing the order’s text. Trump said he worried the measure could dull America’s edge in AI and decided not to proceed with the signing as scheduled, according to the Associated Press.
Trump told reporters that he was postponing the event because he did not like what he saw in the order’s text. He said, “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,” as he explained the decision to change course at the last minute.
The executive order draft, according to a person familiar with the White House’s deliberations with the tech industry who was not authorized to speak publicly, would have laid out a framework for the government to vet national security risks from the most advanced AI systems before their public release. The directive was being characterized as a voluntary collaboration with participating U.S.-based companies, including Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, the person said.
The move toward some kind of government review, as described in the AP report, reflected growing concern in banking and other institutions about how quickly AI systems can find cybersecurity vulnerabilities in software. The report cited a meeting in April that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and outgoing Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell convened with Wall Street chief executives at the Treasury Department, where Bessent warned about cybersecurity risks tied to Anthropic’s AI model, described as Claude Mythos.
Bessent told CNBC’s “Invest in America Forum” in Washington in April that the model was “very powerful” and said the goal of the meeting was to convene banks to discuss best practices. “This new Anthropic model is very powerful,” he said, adding that “Some banks are doing a better job in cybersecurity than others, and we want to have the ability to convene them and talk about what is best practices and where they should be heading.”
The AP report also placed the proposed executive order in the context of an administration that has sought to roll back AI safety regulations adopted by former President Joe Biden. The Trump administration has portrayed the AI sector as an engine for growth and has promoted major AI companies at events at the White House and abroad, with the report noting that Trump had tech executives in tow for a summit with China’s Xi Jinping last week.
The episode highlighted how policy divisions inside the administration could intersect with broader political concerns, the report said. It quoted Serena Booth, a Brown University computer science professor and former AI policy fellow in a Democratic-led Senate committee, who said the administration has shown “public fighting” over the order, describing “whiplash” that she attributed to “fractures” within the White House.
Booth described the administration’s competing impulses as balancing a “reasonable idea” to test the most capable models before public release with a concern that government scrutiny, if it takes too long, could burden AI developers. She said the concern involved “a potential very large cost to innovation and speed of development,” and said she saw “both sides.”
At a White House press briefing Tuesday, Vice President JD Vance declined to discuss specifics from the canceled order, but said the administration’s approach aims to promote innovation while also addressing cybersecurity threats and data privacy. “The president wants us to be pro-innovation. He wants us to win the AI race against all other countries in the world,” Vance said, adding, “We also want to make sure that we’re protecting people.”
The AP report also noted that although the executive order signing was called off, similar screening activity is already occurring through the Commerce Department. The report said the department announced earlier this month that it had signed agreements with Google, Microsoft and xAI to evaluate powerful AI models before they were publicly released, building on earlier agreements the Biden administration made with Anthropic and OpenAI, even as the announcement later disappeared from the Commerce Department website.
The AP report further described additional context involving the administration’s legal and policy posture toward Anthropic. It said Trump in February ordered all U.S. agencies to stop using Anthropic’s chatbot Claude after a dispute between the Pentagon and CEO Dario Amodei, and it said the government is still in an ongoing legal fight with the company. The report also quoted former White House tech adviser Dean Ball, a lead author of Trump’s AI policy road map, who said the disagreements likely reflect “healthy tension” within an administration that has been wary of regulating “frontier AI” companies.
“They don’t want to do it because it’s politically risky in a million different ways,” Ball said, according to the AP report. Ball said he would welcome an executive order that would have those companies working more closely with the government on cybersecurity, adding that he was “ultimately… fine with them taking time to get this right.”