President Trump postponed Thursday’s signing of an executive order on AI cybersecurity, telling reporters in the Oval Office that “I didn’t like certain aspects of it” and adding that the U.S. is “leading China, we’re leading everybody, and I didn’t want to do anything to get in the way of that lead.” The signing had been on the official schedule for hours before it got pulled. The major tech and AI CEOs invited to the ceremony had to find something else to do with their afternoon.
The order that almost shipped would have created a voluntary clearinghouse run through Treasury and other agencies, where frontier AI labs could hand over models up to 90 days before public release. Federal teams would then probe the systems for dangerous capabilities and known security holes before the public got their hands on them. The framing was cyber-defensive: catch the vulnerabilities before someone hostile uses them, not slow the labs down. The participation was voluntary. The labs were reportedly broadly on board.
The relevant context, which is the part the order’s authors apparently could not pitch hard enough at the West Wing: less than two months ago, Anthropic disclosed that its Mythos Preview model had autonomously surfaced thousands of severe and critical software vulnerabilities in normal testing. The argument for the order was essentially “this is what one frontier model can do in a closed lab on a normal Tuesday, please let us see the next one before it ships.” The argument against, which appears to have carried the day inside the West Wing, was that any review window at all puts grit in the gears of American AI dominance.
So the order is back in the drawer and there is no new date on the calendar. The interesting question is whether the version that eventually emerges has anything left in it, or whether the next time we hear about federal AI cybersecurity is when a frontier model gets used to do something genuinely loud and Congress writes the rule the executive branch declined to. The cyber-defense people inside the agencies have to be loving their week.