Donald Trump on Thursday delayed signing a long-anticipated executive order on AI security, saying he was not satisfied with the order's language and was concerned it could slow US leadership in artificial intelligence. "I didn't like certain aspects of it," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. "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," per Decrypt's account of the Oval Office press conference. Trump gave no timeline for revisiting the order.
What would the order have done? The proposal, first unveiled earlier this month, would have tasked the Office of the National Cyber Director and other agencies with building a process to evaluate AI models for security before public release, TechCrunch reported. A key sticking point, per CNN reporting cited in that piece, was a requirement that AI developers share advanced models with the government between 14 and 90 days ahead of launch. The order would also have allowed banks and other critical-infrastructure providers to receive pre-release access to covered models and included a cybersecurity provision aimed at identifying vulnerabilities in unreleased systems.
Why now? The order was drafted partly in response to recent capabilities demonstrations from frontier labs, including Anthropic's Claude Mythos system, which has shown the ability to identify hundreds of software vulnerabilities autonomously, Decrypt reported. An unofficial driver of the delay was that not enough tech CEOs could make it to Washington on short notice for the planned signing photo op, per several reports cited by TechCrunch.
What did Trump say about China? Trump said he had discussed AI with 
Xi Jinping during last week's Beijing summit. "He acknowledges how well we're doing," Trump said. "It was the two of us — the two countries are fighting for it. Other countries are way behind." The president did not specify which provisions of the draft he opposed, and the White House has not said when the rewrite will be ready.
Figures referenced: Donald Trump, Xi Jinping. — JudgeMarket.
