The executive order Trump pulled from the schedule on May 21 because he did not want to slow anybody down got signed on Tuesday in a quieter, shorter form. The new version is titled “Promoting Advanced Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Security,” which is the kind of title that suggests every word was contested in a Cabinet meeting. The mechanism: AI companies are invited, not required, to give the federal government up to 30 days of pre-release access to “powerful enough” frontier models so the government can poke them for cybersecurity and national-security failure modes before public release.
The 30-day window is the actual headline. The previous draft of the order specified 90 days. Industry groups complained that 90 days of mandatory shelf-sitting for any model the government deemed dangerous was a release-cycle killer. The White House heard them, halved the number, and shipped. The Business Software Alliance and the Information Technology Industry Council both issued polite statements thanking the administration for keeping things “voluntary and phased.” Translated out of trade-association: the lobbying worked.
The order also stands up a vulnerability clearinghouse, which the Treasury Department is somehow in charge of running. The clearinghouse is supposed to coordinate discovery, validation, and patching of AI vulnerabilities across labs and critical-infrastructure operators. Nick Leiserson, formerly of the National Cyber Director’s office, captured the consensus reaction to that org chart in one sentence: “Neither AI nor cybersecurity are core competencies of the Treasury Department.” DHS, Treasury, NIST, and the National Cyber Director’s office now have 60 days to jointly define what counts as a “powerful enough” model. Watch that definition closely, because it is going to be the actual policy.
The structural read is that the United States now has a frontier-model government-review regime that is technically voluntary, mostly toothless, and politically locked in. Companies that opt out are betting the next administration will not make it mandatory. Companies that opt in are betting 30 days of access buys them goodwill the next time a model causes a headline. Everybody is going to opt in.