The White House abruptly delayed President Donald Trump’s signing Thursday of an executive order on artificial intelligence — as the president publicly distanced himself from the AI policy his staff had crafted and readied for his approval.
The abrupt delay came after companies and trade groups had already been briefed on the forthcoming order and AI company executives had been invited to attend the ceremony.
“I didn’t like certain aspects of it. I postponed it,” Trump told reporters during a Thursday morning event at the White House shortly after POLITICO and other outlets reported the delay. “I think it gets in the way of — 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.”
The directive, a response to the Trump administration’s rising concerns about cybersecurity threats posed by cutting-edge artificial intelligence models, had been expected to include a voluntary federal review of advanced AI products as far as 90 days before their public release. Agencies involved in the review would have included the Treasury Department, the National Security Agency and the White House’s cyber office, people familiar with the planning had earlier told POLITICO.
In his remarks Thursday, Trump said AI is “causing tremendous good, and it’s also bringing in a lot of jobs.” Trump said he was worried the executive order “could have been a blocker” and he wanted to ensure that was not the case.
It was not immediately clear when the signing might be rescheduled.
Four people familiar with the planning said that the delay was due in part to attendance issues from the leading tech CEOs who were invited. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was unable to attend because of a scheduling conflict, according to two of the people familiar with his plans, but the company intended to send a different OpenAI executive in his place, one person said.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg were also not expected to be able to attend the signing on behalf of their companies, the person said, but planned to send others in their place.
The people were granted anonymity to discuss the sensitive details.
Brendan Bordelon, Yasmin Khorram, Dana Nickel, Dasha Burns and Katherine Long contributed to this report.