Trump’s AI order gives Washington a look at frontier models, but not much leverage

The most powerful AI models are now treated, at least in Washington, as potential national-security events. Before companies release them to the public, the government wants a chance to see what they can do: whether they can discover software vulnerabilities, assist cyberattacks, or otherwise introduce risks that federal officials may not fully understand until the models are already in use. President Trump’s new executive order, signed Tuesday, is meant to give the government that chance. But the final version leaves AI companies with considerable control over the process. It asks them to voluntarily submit advanced models for government review 30 days before public release, and it does not make release conditional on what agencies find. That is a softer framework than the White House had been considering just last month. A previous draft had mandated a 90-day window, which tech industry executives opposed. The president nearly signed the first version of the order, but after a phone call with former AI and crypto czar David Sacks, the EO was put on hold. During another White House meeting on Monday, Sacks again stressed that longer wait times would stifle domestic development of AI models. The approach drew predictable praise from free-market groups. “The administration deserves credit for recognizing that innovation, not precautionary regulation, is what made America the global leader in AI,” says Competitive Enterprise Institute fellow Wayne Crews. The EO is careful to note that the government assessment program is voluntary for AI companies, and that public release of new models is not conditional on the outcome of the assessments. Given the potential destructive power of new AI models such as Anthropic’s Mythos, the order puts the government in a limited role: close enough to review the systems, but not necessarily empowered to slow them down, some tech policy analysts observed. Critics said the voluntary structure leaves too much power in the hands of the com