President Donald Trump has postponed signing an executive order intended to allow government evaluation of AI models before their release.
Trump expressed dissatisfaction with the order’s wording: “I didn’t like certain aspects of it,” he stated. “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 leading.”
An unofficial reason for the delay is that not enough tech CEOs could attend in Washington, D.C. on short notice, as reported by several sources. An executive order signing typically involves a photo opportunity.
The expected executive order aimed to assign the Office of the National Cyber Director and other agencies the task of developing a procedure to assess AI models for security before release. This move is partly due to risks highlighted by the deployment of Anthropic’s Mythos and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 Cyber, both capable of identifying and exploiting security vulnerabilities.
A major point of contention in the order’s text, as reported by CNN, is a suggested mandate for AI companies to provide the government with advanced models 14 to 90 days prior to launch.
Trump noted concerns that the current wording of the order “could have been a blocker.”