After nearly two weeks of delays, Trump finally signed his AI executive order on Tuesday. The whole thing is voluntary.
The order, titled "Promoting Advanced Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Security," asks frontier AI labs to submit new models to the government for a national security review before release. But it goes out of its way to take the teeth out. Section 3 explicitly states that nothing in the order creates "a mandatory governmental licensing, preclearance, or permitting requirement" for AI development or deployment. If a lab wants to skip the review, nothing in the order stops them.
How it got that toothless is its own story. Trump was supposed to sign a stricter version on May 21, but he pulled out that morning after former AI and crypto czar David Sacks called him directly to urge him not to, according to Politico. White House staff, including some of Sacks' own people, didn't know it was happening. Trump told reporters later that day he "didn't like certain aspects of it," explaining, "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."
The negotiation that followed was mostly about how much time the government would get to look at a new model before release. The original White House proposal asked for 90 days. Industry came back asking for 14. The version Trump signed landed at 30 days, with no enforcement mechanism if a company decides to opt out.
Industry groups welcomed it. Victoria Espinel, CEO of the Business Software Alliance, called the phased voluntary approach a sensible way for industry, government, and security experts to collaborate. Linda Moore at TechNet said it spares companies from "a maze of conflicting and unworkable requirements that threaten America's ability to compete globally." OpenAI's chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane said safety frameworks should be developed through "democratic institutions," which is a careful way of saying Congress, not regulators.
Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, was less generous. He said the framework "lacks significant substance" and accused the administration of doing "Big AI's bidding." States aren't waiting around for federal clarity either. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis pointed out that an executive order can't preempt state legislative action, signaling that the patchwork of state AI laws the industry has been trying to head off is going to keep growing.
The strange part of this order is that Trump's own voters wanted something stricter than what he signed. A Future of Life Institute poll found 79% of Republican voters support the government testing AI models before release, and 87% want the government to be able to block models that pose a national security threat. The signed order doesn't do either. That gap between what the base wants and what the donors wrote is going to define the next round of this fight, and it'll probably get settled by the first state attorney general who decides a voluntary federal framework isn't standing in their way.
