AI Governance by Phone Call
An executive order so deferential to the AI industry that it disclaimed any mandatory authority still couldn't survive a few last-minute calls.
On Wednesday, the White House invited leaders of OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Meta, and Microsoft to the Oval Office for a signing ceremony the following afternoon. President Trump was to sign an executive order on AI and cybersecurity—the administration's most formal effort yet to establish a voluntary process for reviewing frontier models before their release. But roughly three hours before the ceremony, when some company executives were already in the air to Washington, the White House called it off.
Trump told reporters he had "postponed" the order because he "didn't like certain aspects of it," adding: "I think it gets in the way of—you know, 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 lead." Former White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks called the president that morning—"unbeknownst to anybody," one official said, and "derailed it." Sacks purportedly raised concerns held by some in the AI industry that a "voluntary" review system could harden into a de facto licensing regime, slow the pace of American AI development, and hand China the lead. One source offered a blunter explanation for the president’s decision: Trump "just hates regulation," and the order was "just something doomers wanted."
There’s a line among public policy watchers that policy is personnel. This latest episode adds support to the idea that policy is also personal. However, it would be wrong to treat all of this as just another episode of disorganized personalism in the White House. Two additional elements of this story are worth emphasizing. The first is the substance of what was killed—about as mild an intervention as a serious government response to frontier-model risk could be. The second is the absence of any reliable process for working through frontier-AI disagreements, which matters more right now than it would in most periods: The next three years are likely the inflection point for the technology, and the United States cannot afford to govern them by impulse.
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