U.S. President Donald Trump called off a signing ceremony Thursday for a new order on artificial intelligence because he worried it could dull America’s edge on AI technology.
Trump said he was postponing the signing because he did not like what he saw in the order’s text. He announced the change hours before the event was scheduled to take place in the Oval Office.
“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,” Trump told reporters at an unrelated Oval Office event.
The push for some kind of government action to vet the most powerful AI systems follows growing concern within the banking industry and other institutions about the leaps in AI’s abilities to find cybersecurity vulnerabilities in the world’s software.
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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and outgoing Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell convened an urgent meeting with Wall Street CEOs in April, warning them about the cybersecurity risks posed by Anthropic’s AI model, Claude Mythos.
The meeting, urgently assembled at the Treasury Department’s headquarters, was intended to ensure that banks were aware of the risks associated with the models, Bessent said at CNBC’s “Invest in America Forum” in Washington in April.
“This new Anthropic model is very powerful,” he said.
“Some banks are doing a better job in cybersecurity than others, and we want to have the ability to convene them and talk about what is best practices and where they should be heading.”
That led some allies of the Republican president to propose better methods for getting those AI tools in the hands of trusted cybersecurity experts.
But an approach that could be perceived as government screening of commercial AI models would have signaled a significant shift in Trump’s pledges coming into his second White House term to undo the AI safety regulations set by Democratic President Joe Biden.
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