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Three Phone Calls and America's AI Safety Order Was Dead

President Trump cancelled a planned executive order on AI safety at the last minute after phone calls from Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and former AI advisor David Sacks, who warned that the proposed measures could slow AI development and jeopardise America's competitive edge over China. The draft order would have established a voluntary system requiring AI companies to submit frontier models to federal agencies for safety testing up to 90 days before release. The order has been shelved for reworking, with critics inside the administration dismissing it as unnecessary fearmongering pushed by AI "doomers."

Donald Trump was hours away from signing an executive order on AI safety last Thursday. Invitations had gone out to major tech CEOs. Some were already travelling to Washington. Then the phones started ringing.

Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and former White House AI and crypto advisor David Sacks each called Trump between Wednesday evening and Thursday morning. By the time the Oval Office ceremony was supposed to begin, it was cancelled. Trump said he didn't like the draft and didn't want anything slowing down America's position in the AI race with China.

The order itself was fairly modest in scope. It would have asked AI companies to voluntarily submit their frontier models to federal agencies up to 90 days before public release, giving the government time to probe for dangerous capabilities or exploitable weaknesses before bad actors got there first. Mandatory licensing was explicitly off the table. The whole thing was reportedly prompted in part by Anthropic's Mythos model, which can autonomously identify and exploit security vulnerabilities in code.

The strangest part of the story involves Sacks. He'd been briefed on the draft by science advisor Michael Kratsios, staff secretary Will Scharf, and National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross, and had initially indicated he could live with it. Then, late Wednesday night, he changed his mind. His concern was that a voluntary system could gradually become mandatory in practice and be weaponised by future administrations. By Thursday morning he'd called Trump directly, apparently without telling his own staff, and the whole signing was dead before breakfast.

The reaction inside the industry wasn't uniform. OpenAI's lobbyist broadly backed the order. Other companies wanted the 90-day review window slashed to 14 days. The decision to put the Treasury Department in a lead role also confused people familiar with how these things usually work, since CISA and NIST are the agencies that normally handle anything resembling technical safety review.

One government official offered perhaps the most revealing take, dismissing the entire effort to Axios as unnecessary and something pushed by 'doomers'. That word gets deployed a lot in tech circles to write off anyone who thinks powerful AI systems might warrant some government scrutiny before being shipped to the public.

The White House says the order will be reworked rather than abandoned entirely. What that means in practice is anyone's guess, though the lesson from Thursday seems to be that a well-timed phone call from the right billionaire carries more weight than months of policy drafting.