President Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday that asked technology companies to voluntarily give the government oversight of new artificial intelligence models before releasing them to the public, a shift for an administration that had promoted a hands-off approach to the powerful technology.
The order followed months of debate in the Trump administration over how to handle AI and its effects on cybersecurity and national security. Last month, Trump scrapped an executive order on AI — which would have created a window of up to 90 days in which the government would review new AI models before they were released — just hours before he was set to sign it.
Tuesday’s signing followed a meeting at the White House on Monday that Trump convened with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and David Sacks, who was previously the administration’s AI czar, among others, two people familiar with the confidential meeting said. Sacks, who had opposed the order, blessed a revised version after the timeline for reviews was cut to 30 days from 90 days, the people said.
The order is the Trump administration’s biggest step toward regulating artificial intelligence.
Under the new order, tech companies would voluntarily give the government a window of up to 30 days to review their new AI models before releasing them to the public. The order also asks the Treasury secretary to form an AI “cybersecurity clearinghouse,” which would review security vulnerabilities discovered by AI models.
Tech executives were scrambling to determine how the order would affect an AI industry that has enjoyed largely unchecked economic growth. Some companies said the order could ease public worries about AI. Others were concerned the order could slow development and lead to stricter regulation down the line.
Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president; Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer; Kent Walker, Google’s president of global affairs, and other executives separately praised the order as “an important step” that would balance AI safety and innovation.
Anthropic and Meta did not immediately provide a comment.
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The decision for the White House to begin a formal oversight process of AI models began in April, when Anthropic announced a new AI model, Mythos, which the company said could find software vulnerabilities and lead to a cybersecurity “reckoning.” Government officials, banks and others worried that future AI models could find vulnerabilities that U.S. enemies would exploit.
