By Karen Freifeld, Jody Godoy, Courtney Rozen and Jacob Bogage
May 21 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday said he had postponed signing an executive order on AI because he did not like certain aspects of it and did not want to take any steps that might undermine the U.S. position in its AI competition with China.
Trump had planned to sign the order at a ceremony on Thursday afternoon attended by CEOs of AI companies.
“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,” he told reporters in the Oval Office.
The order would create a voluntary framework for AI developers to engage with the U.S. government before the public release of advanced AI models, two sources familiar with the order told Reuters on Wednesday.
Trump did not specify which parts of the executive order he objected to. Tech industry advocates fear that the order’s provisions could hurt the industry’s profits if they slow the rollout of new models or prompt companies to change how those models perform in order to address security concerns.
The president also had planned to direct the U.S. government to use the advanced models to improve the cybersecurity defenses of government systems, along with networks owned by sectors that are vital to the nation’s economy such as banks and hospitals, according to another source.
Concerns are growing across the U.S. government and in the private sector about the cybersecurity risks posed by powerful new AI systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos. Anthropic has warned that Mythos could supercharge complex cyberattacks, although cybersecurity experts told Reuters that fears of unfettered hacking are overstated.
Trump, since regaining power, has taken a softer stance towards Big Tech firms than the administration of his predecessor, President Joe Biden, with the emergence of AI and its outsized role in U.S. equity markets. Some prominent Trump supporters, however, are calling for guardrails around the technology.
(Reporting by Courtney Rozen and Jacob Bogage in Washington, Jody Godoy and Karen Freifeld in New York; writing by David Ljunggren, Editing by Franklin Paul, Deepa Babington and Edmund Klamann)
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