US President Donald Trump canceled the signing of an executive order on AI safety scheduled for Thursday. Phone calls from Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and former AI advisor David Sacks tipped the scales, according to multiple reports.
The White House had already sent invitations to the heads of the biggest tech companies. Some executives were already on their way to Washington, the Washington Post reported. Hours before the planned ceremony, Trump called off the Oval Office signing, saying he didn't like the draft and didn't want to do anything that could threaten America's lead in the AI race with China.
The cancellation followed a flurry of phone calls between Wednesday evening and Thursday morning. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, and former AI and crypto advisor David Sacks brought their concerns directly to Trump. They warned that the planned review system could slow down AI development, according to the Washington Post and Politico.
The order would have created a voluntary vetting system. AI companies would submit their frontier models to federal agencies up to 90 days before release so the government could test for dangerous capabilities and find weaknesses before hackers or foreign actors exploit them. The draft explicitly ruled out mandatory government licensing or pre-approval. The push came in response to new models like Anthropic's Mythos, which can independently find and exploit security flaws in code, according to the Washington Post.
Sacks reverses course at the last minute
Sacks had been briefed on the draft by science advisor Michael Kratsios, staff secretary Will Scharf, and National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross. He initially signaled he could live with it. Then, late Wednesday night, he started raising concerns that the voluntary system could become mandatory in practice and be abused by future administrations, the Washington Post reported. By Thursday morning, he called Trump directly without telling anyone, including his own staff, and derailed the whole thing, Politico reported, citing a senior White House official.
A government official told Axios the whole effort was unnecessary and just something the so-called doomers wanted, a term often used dismissively in tech circles for voices warning about existential risks from advanced AI systems and pushing for government safety reviews. The order was divisive within the industry, too. OpenAI lobbyist Chris Lehane broadly supported it, according to Politico. Other companies pushed to cut the 90-day review window to 14 days. The draft's plan to give the Treasury Department a lead role also raised eyebrows, since safety reviews are typically handled by CISA and NIST.
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