President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed a scaled-back executive order that seeks to address the cybersecurity threats of artificial intelligence — but with less-advanced government scrutiny than the White House had been set to impose last month, according to two White House officials familiar with the matter granted anonymity to discuss it.
The order, signed privately, asks some AI companies to submit their powerful new models to a voluntary government review 30 days before releasing the products to the public. An earlier draft of the document had called for a voluntary review as much as 90 days in advance, a provision that some AI industry officials had pushed to whittle to 14 days, POLITICO reported last month.
The signing comes after Trump participated in a small, high-level meeting at the White House on Monday about next steps for the AI executive order, according to the two officials and another person familiar with the matter and granted anonymity to discuss it.
Trump had been scheduled to sign the 90-day version of the order May 21, but he abruptly rejected that draft just hours before the planned White House signing.
The White House’s changes to the executive order are just the latest in a series of huge shifts in the United States’ AI policy, driven by sharply conflicting factions within Trump’s administration. Trump came into office seeking to ease regulatory burdens on AI in hopes of outcompeting China, but that policy has morphed as powerful new models such as Anthropic’s Mythos threaten to undermine cybersecurity in even the most sensitive computer systems.
The White House this week avoided a repeat of May 21 when a previous version of Trump’s much-awaited executive order on artificial intelligence was derailed after former AI czar David Sacks called Trump hours before the planned signing ceremony. At the time, it had received signoff by White House officials at the highest levels and had been reviewed by OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.