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.
