Report: White House AI oversight executive order DOA
After weeks of uncertainty, the White House’s plan to review frontier models before release appears dead.
Yesterday, the White House was supposed to hold a star-studded ceremony with the titans of tech and AI flanking President Trump as he scrawled his jagged signature with a Sharpie, establishing a process for the US government to review AI models before release.
The event never happened, and the policy itself looks set to be shelved permanently, after direct lobbying of the president by Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg, Tesla’s Elon Musk, and White House AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks between Wednesday night and Thursday evening, Axios reported today.
Axios quoted a source familiar with the plans who said the regulation was “just something doomers wanted.”
Ever since Anthropic warned that its new Mythos AI model could chain together vulnerabilities in novel ways — preventing its release for now — governments and companies around the world have been genuinely spooked, including the Trump administration. As agencies scrambled to get on the exclusive list of partners given early access to Mythos for testing, all signals were that some kind of new oversight over AI was going to happen.
The now shelved executive order would have amounted to the only meaningful oversight of America’s move-fast-and-break-things AI industry. The last reported details of the plan described a voluntary, multi-agency government review process that would allow up to 90 days of testing and analysis before companies could release significant new frontier models.
Up until Thursday, the plan seemed to be settled. On Wednesday, Source’s Alex Heath reported the impressive guest list:
Tesla’s Elon Musk
Amazon’s Andy Jassy
Microsoft’s Sundar Pichai
Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg
Google’s Satya Nadella
Apple CEO Tim Cook
OpenAI’s Sam Altman
Anthropic’s Dario Amodei
Salesforce’s Marc Benioff
Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora
CrowdStrike’s George Kurtz
Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins
Reflection AI CEO Misha Laskin
That is a crazy concentration of the most powerful players in AI. (Was Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang snubbed again?) It takes a significant amount of planning to pull together that type of guest list, but despite the prep work, by Thursday morning, the day the order was to be signed, Axios reported that the ceremony was “postponed.” Later that day, when asked about the change of plans, President Trump told reporters, “I didn’t like certain aspects of it. I postponed it.”
