The tech bros struck back.
That’s the best way to describe what happened yesterday when President Donald Trump suddenly decided to indefinitely postpone signing an Executive Order on AI, even as technology company executives he had invited to be present at the White House for the signing were traveling to Washington for the ceremony.
“I didn’t like certain aspects of it,” Trump explained to reporters at the White House on Thursday morning. “I think it gets in the way of—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.”
The order would have created a system in which AI companies could voluntarily submit their most advanced models to key national security agencies for testing and vetting up to 90 days prior to releasing them. Officials from multiple government departments and agencies had spent weeks negotiating over the executive order’s language, and leading AI companies had been briefed on its content. At least two of those companies, Anthropic and OpenAI, had indicated they were in favor of the voluntary vetting system.
Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, for instance, was among more than 60 MAGA loyalists who earlier this week signed an open letter to Trump urging him to test and approve powerful AI models before they are released. The letter was organized by Humans First, a conservative group whose tagline is “technology should serve humans…not replace them.”
A poll of Republican voters released today by the Future of Life Institute, an AI safety group concerned with AI’s potential existential risk to humanity, found that 79% were in favor of the government testing AI models before they are released to ensure they are safe, and that 87% favored the government having the power to block the release of AI models that pose a national security threat.
“Our image and the stereotype is that Republicans are against regulation,” Michael Kleinman, head of U.S. policy for the Future of Life Institute, told Fortune. “But what we are finding instead is when people see a technology that has direct and often incredibly negative impact on their lives, their kids, and their communities, they want the government to step in and put in place common sense guardrails.”
Kleinman said that while Sacks and the Silicon Valley faction of Trump’s base have prevailed for now, public opinion and the trends in AI development were against them. “Public opinion is solidifying on both the left and the right,” he said. “Mythos won’t be the last model that these companies release that will pose significant national security threats—it is the first such model. So the pressure is only going to continue to build for the government to take common sense action.”
The Trump administration is, for the moment, continuing to exercise a kind of ad hoc licensing process for just that one AI model, Anthropic’s Mythos. Anthropic has shared the model with the U.S. government and, under what Anthropic calls Project Glasswing, with a select handful of U.S. technology companies and financial institutions who make software that underpins much of the internet and other critical infrastructure. But the White House, according to press reports, blocked Anthropic from expanding the number of companies with access to Mythos due to national security concerns.
Meanwhile, OpenAI has created an AI model, GPT-5.5, that—according to OpenAI’s own testing and that carried out by the U.K. government’s AI Security Institute—is almost as capable as Mythos. OpenAI has released the model only to partners in a “trusted access” program, although the program is less limited than Anthropic’s Glasswing. The U.S. government has not applied the same scrutiny to the expansion of OpenAI’s trusted access program for GPT-5.5 as it has to Glasswing.
A number of AI companies also voluntarily share their most advanced AI models with the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), which evaluates them for some potential risks. But CAISI is part of the Department of Commerce and its experts do not necessarily have access to classified information to help them assess the risks AI models pose, or the expertise in advanced cyber security methods that parts of the U.S. national security establishment have.
There were also disputes between factions of Trump advisors. Kevin Hassett, the director of the National Economic Council, suggested last week that the administration would set up a licensing system similar to how the Food and Drug Administration reviews testing of drugs before approving them for sale. That brought a rebuke on social media from White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who said the president was not “in the business of picking winners and losers.”
