Trump Scraps AI Executive Order After Musk and Zuckerberg Lobby
3 min readPresident Trump abruptly canceled the signing ceremony for a sweeping AI oversight executive order on Thursday, pulling the plug just hours before the Oval Office event was set to begin. The decision came after late-night calls from Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and venture capitalist David Sacks, who argued the order would slow American AI companies down at a critical moment in the race against China.
The reversal is a striking win for the accelerationist wing of the tech industry and a setback for officials inside the White House who spent months drafting the framework.
What the Order Would Have Done
The draft order would have created a voluntary mechanism for leading AI developers to submit advanced models to federal agencies for security review up to 90 days before public release. The review was billed as light-touch and optional, with no penalties for skipping it. According to reporting from Axios, the framework had been workshopped with several frontier labs and was viewed inside the administration as a relatively modest compromise.
Trump told reporters he postponed the order because “I didn’t like certain aspects of it,” adding that the United States is “leading China, we’re leading everybody, and I didn’t want to do anything to get in the way of that lead.”
The Lobbying Push
Between Wednesday night and Thursday morning, three of the most influential voices in tech got the president on the phone. Semafor reported that Musk, Zuckerberg, and Sacks each made the same core argument: a voluntary review process could quickly harden into a de facto licensing regime under a future administration, giving Washington a chokepoint over model releases.
Sacks, who serves as the White House AI and crypto czar, reportedly framed the issue in starkly competitive terms, warning that any delay between model completion and public launch would hand Chinese labs an opening to ship first. Fortune noted that the pitch landed especially well with officials at the National Economic Council, who have been openly skeptical of preemptive AI rules.
Why It Matters
The pulled order leaves the federal government without a formal pre-release review process for frontier AI models, even as systems get more capable each quarter. Voluntary safety commitments now rest entirely on individual lab policies, which vary widely and can change at any time. State legislatures, most notably in California and New York, are already moving to fill the vacuum with their own rules, raising the prospect of a patchwork of conflicting requirements that the executive order had been designed to head off.
It also marks a shift in how AI policy is being shaped. Frontier labs spent much of the past two years asking Washington for clearer guardrails. The episode this week shows that a different coalition, one that prizes speed and competitive position over preemptive review, now has the loudest line into the Oval Office. Whether Trump revisits the order with revisions or scraps it entirely will signal how durable that influence is.