Bottom line: Trump halted the signing of an AI executive order because he considered certain provisions anticompetitive and wanted to avoid the decree blocking progress.
The White House has postponed the planned signing of an AI executive order by Donald Trump on short notice. Trump voiced criticism about individual points in the draft and feared that it could hamper innovation.
The executive order was intended to respond to increased cybersecurity concerns regarding advanced AI models and would have provided for a voluntary government review of advanced AI products up to 90 days before their public release. The Department of the Treasury, the National Security Agency, and the White House Cyber Office would have been involved.
Trump stated on Thursday that AI brings “an enormous amount of good” and creates many jobs. He feared that the executive order “could be a blocker” and wanted to rule this out. Publicly, he justified the postponement on the grounds that he did not want to jeopardize U.S. leadership vis-à-vis China.
According to information from four people familiar with the planning, logistics also played a role: several invited tech CEOs were unable to attend. Sam Altman (OpenAI) had a scheduling conflict, Dario Amodei (Anthropic) and Mark Zuckerberg (Meta) were also not expected to be present in person, but their companies were planning to send other representatives. A new date for the signing has not yet been set.
Source: ainews-dev.lumi-systems.io · Published May 21, 2026
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