8 ms·

Trump signs downsized AI order after weeks of reversals

• albert_e 4mo ago
  Timing around Anthropic valuation crossing OpenAI and getting ready for IPO ...
• culi 4mo ago
  The Executive Order: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/06/promoting-advanced-artificial-intelligence-innovation-and-security/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/06/prom... IMO this isn't much more egregious than the "stop woke AI" executive order he signed in July 2025 which explicitly regulated the "ideology" of LLMs https://www.paulhastings.com/insights/client-alerts/president-trump-signs-three-executive-orders-relating-to-artificial https://www.paulhastings.com/insights/client-alerts/presiden...
  • _alternator_ 4mo ago
    Yeah, the order itself seems like a fairly reasonable response to Mythos level capabilities. It does solve one problem of the frontier labs, which is safely coordinating releases without hitting antitrust regulations. It also makes a bigger moat for incumbents.
  • dang 4mo ago
    Thanks - we put that link in the toptext. I also moved the submitted URL (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/02/technology/trump-executive-order-ai.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/02/technology/trump-executiv...) to the toptext and changed the main link to https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/02/trump-signs-downsized-ai-order-00946389 https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/02/trump-signs-downsiz... since it seems to have more information.
• 4ffa 4mo ago
  [dead]
• andsoitis 4mo ago
  So this is going back to the spirit of what the Biden admin and the frontier labs wanted just recently? https://www.bis.gov/press-release/biden-harris-administration-announces-regulatory-framework-responsible-diffusion-advanced-artificial https://www.bis.gov/press-release/biden-harris-administratio... More regulated rather than unregulated (or very lightly regulated). Most people would probably say that’s a good thing, if I read the tea leaves correctly.
  • throwaway894345 4mo ago
    > Most people would probably say that’s a good thing, if I read the tea leaves correctly. I'm very pessimistic that this is about AI safety. I think it's probably more about giving the Trump administration leverage over AI companies. It will be able to coerce them into e.g. propagandizing or surveilling or similar or else they will risk the same kind of "regulatory oversight" that caused television networks to fire comedians who made jokes the regime didn't like.
  • ActorNightly 4mo ago
    With conservatives, every accusation is an admission. Only the gullible people fall for the actual rhetoric.
• k310 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  • andsoitis 4mo ago
    Do you think AI should be unregulated?
    • tssva 4mo ago
      If AI is going to be regulated those regulations should be debated in public and based upon the resulting laws passed by the legislative process and not determined by royal decree.
      • andsoitis 4mo ago
        The previous administration did same: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14110 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14110 So if we’re going to be rational about it, I think it is better to critique the substance of the EO rather than its mere existence, which is common practice: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/executive-orders https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/executive-or... So in that spirit, what do you think of the substance?
        • _aavaa_ 4mo ago
          No, we can be rational and critique its existence. Especially given the current administration’s track record.
        • jMyles 4mo ago
          Well sure, the previous administration also abused executive authority. That's not news or controversial in any way. How does that make it better for the current administration to do it?
          • andsoitis 4mo ago
            Executive Orders are a common practice across presidencies, not just the current and previous: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/executive-orders https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/executive-or... Whether that’s abuse or not I am not equipped to say with any confidence. I’d be curious to understand why you think this particular case is one of abusing executive authority and when an EO might not be such a case?
• skeledrew 4mo ago
  So going forward expect US models to respond only in ways considered appropriate by the administration. If people thought models were producing slop before... lol.
  • ranger_danger 4mo ago
    No... executive orders are not laws, they can only command the federal government, not individuals or corporations. Meaning this is mostly pointless unless you're using models hosted by the government.
    • xena 4mo ago
      Who is going to stop the federal government from enforcing them as if they were laws?
      • ranger_danger 4mo ago
        The judicidial branch, so the courts. The government would have to sue the corporation to try to get them to do something, at which point (hopefully) the judge would strike it down.
        • skeledrew 4mo ago
          What courts? Look at all that's been happening over the past months. How much of it have the courts been able to meaningfully impact, vs what's still in effect?
          • ranger_danger 4mo ago
            > How much of it have the courts been able to meaningfully impact A lot more than you think, apparently https://www.justsecurity.org/107087/tracker-litigation-legal-challenges-trump-administration/ https://www.justsecurity.org/107087/tracker-litigation-legal...
• pj_mukh 4mo ago
  "The final text asks some AI companies to submit their powerful new models to a voluntary government review 30 days before releasing the products to the public, a pause that would give federal agencies some time to gauge what threats the products may pose to sensitive financial, national security and other computer systems." How specifically does that review work? I want to give federal agency Opus 4.8 now, while 4.7 has been out for a while (leaving Mythos aside for now). They have 30 days to figure out whether it poses a threat. How do you do that? Is there an eval for this and if there is why can't they just make it public? What is the agencies objective (but proprietary?) analysis here?
  • onlyrealcuzzo 4mo ago
    It's just so Elon Musk gets to personally delay releases so Grok can maybe ever gain any meaningful traction...
    • sethops1 4mo ago
      Also to probably distill from other models, as he admitted to already doing during his failed trial against OpenAI.
      • sidewndr46 4mo ago
        Do you have a link to that?
        • unshavedyak 4mo ago
          Not the parent, but i assume these are relevant: - https://web.archive.org/web/20260602130637/https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/05/01/1136800/musk-v-altman-week-1-musk-says-he-was-duped-warns-ai-could-kill-us-all-and-admits-that-xai-distills-openais-models/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260602130637/https://www.techn... - https://web.archive.org/web/20260520190620/https://fortune.com/2026/05/05/musk-court-fight-openai/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260520190620/https://fortune.c...
  • 4mo ago
• euleriancon 4mo ago
  There doesn't really seem to be anything of substance in the actual executive order. Section 1 doesn't say anything Section 2 seems to boil down to: "improve cyber security and maybe use AI if we can find funding for it" Section 3 proposes building a benchmark for evaluating cyber security performance of models that developers can choose to benchmark against. This seems like a good idea, I know Jack Clark has been a huge advocate for government's getting in with benchmarking. Section 4 says to prioritize prosecuting cyber crimes. Not sure why they wouldn't already be prosecuted. Section 5 doesn't say anything
  • deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  • culi 4mo ago
    Almost a year ago we got EO 14319 or the "Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government" that explicitly regulated the "ideology" of LLMs. This Executive Order is just an expansion of the existing censorship framework.
    • nradov 4mo ago
      There is no actual regulation in EO 14319. It only covers federal government purchasing and vendor management. No one is required to change the "ideology" of an LLM, although they might not be able to sell it to the government. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/07/28/2025-14217/preventing-woke-ai-in-the-federal-government https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/07/28/2025-14...
      • fragmede 4mo ago
        With land desperately trying to recoup their costs on multi-hundred million dollar training runs, those are some very fine hairs you're splitting.
        • nradov 4mo ago
          Which hair is that? My statement was 100% accurate.
• parliament32 4mo ago
  Step 1: Require companies to submit product for "review" Step 2: Complain about how the OSS/Chinese/whatever models are doing releases without approval Step 3: Prohibit, because "safety" and "financial risks"(?) So this is the door-shutting Altman et al have been pushing for eh?
  • supriyo-biswas 4mo ago
    It is surprising to me American companies completely absent from the open model space, even though we have historically seen companies doing open source.
    • davidkwast 4mo ago
      As what we say here in Brazil: "The world doesn't go round. It flips over!"
    • yoyohello13 4mo ago
      American companies are interested in cashing in, not making a good product.
    • treis 4mo ago
      Llama?
    • ndiddy 4mo ago
      One of the main reasons why companies start new open source projects is because having a good open source option in a given category will usually push the market value of software in that category to $0, and this can be strategically valuable. For example, Google released Android as an open source operating system because they make their money from ads and data collection, not from selling operating system licenses. All the cell phone companies switched from Windows Mobile and Symbian to Android, which gave Google a ton of user data to sell. For AI, the most profitable part of the value chain is selling inference. None of the big American companies want to release a leading edge model as open source because this would drive the price of inference to $0. Meanwhile, open source AI models are a huge strategic initiative for China. Having commodity Chinese models that are as good as the leading edge American models from 6 months ago forces the American companies to keep paying more and more money to train better and better models since the amount of time they can collect rent on a model they've previously trained is limited to 6 months.
• 2001zhaozhao 4mo ago
  > The final text asks some AI companies to submit their powerful new models to a voluntary government review 30 days before releasing the products to the public, a pause that would give federal agencies some time to gauge what threats the products may pose to sensitive financial, national security and other computer systems. > An earlier draft of the order had called for a voluntary review as much as 90 days in advance, a provision that some AI industry officials had called too onerous, POLITICO reported last month. A 90 days delay on the release of new models would have been insane. I guess I'm glad it's been revised at least on this specific point.
  • greggoB 4mo ago
    > A 90 days delay on the release of new models would have been insane. I guess I'm glad it's been revised at least on this specific point. What would have made it "insane" exactly? The only argument I can imagine is that it gives non-US models (e.g. DeepSeek) a potential edge in the market during that time. But this potentially seems to be mitigated it being banned in the US anyway [0]. Given society seems to have developed just fine prior to the release of LLMs, I don't understand what the rush for more powerful and - potentially - more dangerous iterations of this technology is. If there is a legitimate reason that 90 days is somehow catastrophic, can someone ELI5? [0] https://statetechmagazine.com/article/2025/04/these-states-have-banned-deepseek https://statetechmagazine.com/article/2025/04/these-states-h...
    • lugu 4mo ago
      US laws don't apply globally.
      • greggoB 4mo ago
        Not really the point, plus doesn't answer the primary basis of my comment :)
      • reasonableklout 4mo ago
        Coordination between powers is possible, and starts with actions like this which show a willingness to compromise.
• waynecochran 4mo ago
  Somewhere in all this it is crazy that the choice could be between a US company creating an AI that could doom civilization or letting China create the AI that dooms civilization. Do we want to be the first to "summon the demon" in our own fashion or let China manifest it first. Not saying this is the choice, but it would be a crazy dillema, albeit easy choice imo, if it was.
  • worik 4mo ago
    > albeit easy choice imo China, obviously.
    • waynecochran 4mo ago
      Mao would have been great w AGI.
      • fragmede 4mo ago
        Stick "what did Mao think of lazy people" into your closest LLM for a different take on that.
  • tw85 4mo ago
    [flagged]
  • anon291 4mo ago
    nothing is dooming civilization. These takes are so dumb. Civilization exists because humans want to reproduce.
    • waynecochran 4mo ago
      I don't see it either, but there are folks smarter than both of us that disagree.
      • AnimalMuppet 4mo ago
        "Folks smarter than us" sometimes start from really weird starting points. Their logic from their may be flawless, better than we can do, but if their starting point is wrong, who cares? They aren't going to get wrong answers anyway. They're just going to go further extrapolating the logical consequences of the wrong starting point, and that's not really any more useful than a stupid person doing it.
• cdrnsf 4mo ago
  Is this legally enforceable or is it nonsense via the White House site instead of Truth Social?
• internet_points 4mo ago
  So that the NSA can use them to find the zero-days first?
• insane_dreamer 4mo ago
  BigAI contributions/bribes paying off (probably a good thing, in this particular case)
• grassfedgeek 4mo ago
  An executive order is not law. Why should any company submit their models for review?
  • braiamp 4mo ago
    Because EO can get annoying to fight, companies would prefer to not fighting it. That's why these actions are to be remembered, companies will complain, but they will also comply.
  • driverdan 4mo ago
    They shouldn't but they've all shown they lack the fortitude to stand up to Trump. All the big tech companies are run by cowards willing to sacrifice ethics for money.
  • acdha 4mo ago
    Here are a couple of things I’d worry about, especially with an administration willing to use its power in ways previously considered off limits: 1. Any company which doesn’t is banned from federal contracts 2. Any company which doesn’t is declared a supply chain risk and federal contractors will be prohibited from doing business with them (e.g. AWS/Azure/GCP can’t offer them to customers without risking their unrelated contracts). That was the big risk Anthropic was worried about. 3. Federal prosecutors and regulators will be told to prioritize going after non-compliant companies on unrelated issues as leverage. 4. These companies will not be granted the same exceptions in tariff negotiations as competitors, which means things like data center buildouts get pricier. Even if they can successfully fight something in court, that’s expensive and uncertain so it puts a lot of pressure on companies. There are likely also cases where politicized tax or H1-B enforcement could be hard to fight in court because much of the industry is gambling on lax enforcement.
• wnevets 4mo ago
  [flagged]
• clear-octopus 4mo ago
  [dead]
• anon291 4mo ago
  No one should have to submit any published work to government review, even voluntary. This is a basic speech issue. Absolutely no one would be okay with authors being 'encouraged' to submit their works to a 'voluntary' review by the feds to ascertain if their ideas are threatening. AI models are NO different.
• sunjester 4mo ago
  I guess it would help if they even knew what "AI" was.
  • cdrnsf 4mo ago
    Or if they were intelligent at all.
  • rimliu 4mo ago
    It would also help if many AI bros knew that LLM is not AI.
• arm32 4mo ago
  There’ll be a movie written about all this someday. It’ll be great.
  • incognito124 4mo ago
    It'll be the greatest movie this decade, possibly ever
    • tmpz22 4mo ago
      It’ll be way better then the Obama movie! I heard that movie had the worst ratings ever! It wasnt even made in the US! \s
  • dboreham 4mo ago
    Many movies.
  • chadcmulligan 4mo ago
    It's sort of ruined those movies where the president becomes an action hero though - 'Air Force one', 'White House Down' ....
  • kakacik 4mo ago
    Well if Hollywood would pick it up it would probably not resemble actual reality much, just bunch of drama, blah, patriotic pathos to please less intelligent half of population etc. Mostly unviewable movies for non-US audience.
    • arm32 4mo ago
      Yawn, I almost fell asleep just thinking about how much of a bore Hollywood is.
• bastawhiz 4mo ago
  > It also directs the Justice Department to pursue criminal cases against any individuals who use AI models to hack into computer systems. Were we not pursuing criminal cases against these individuals previously? Or have we only just decided to make crimes be against the law now? Edit: let's all remember, by the way, this "review" period does nothing for security. It exists to allow members of the government to trade on insider knowledge.
  • boramdd 4mo ago
    I think this might be "white/gray" hackers/wannabes trying to find vulnerabilities in government systems. And overwhelming them by their sheet numbers unintentionally.
• indianrestrooms 4mo ago
  [dead]
• chris_explicare 4mo ago
  [dead]
• arabscum 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  • seanmcdirmid 4mo ago
    Journalism always refer to presidents by their last name, saving ink and tokens not repeating president over and over again since everyone knows that. Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, it’s always been like that and Trump isn’t getting special treatment. Except trump loved using Obama’a first and middle name and tried to get FoxNews to change their style guide to use that instead (it didn’t stick). The style guide has been to use only last names in headlines and titles for a very very long time (yes, they used it for Biden also).
• zombot 4mo ago
  > “Nothing in this section shall be construed to authorize the creation of a mandatory governmental licensing, preclearance, or permitting requirement for the development, publication, release, or distribution of new AI models, including frontier models.” As other commenters have mentioned, it leaves the question what on earth this EO is actually good for. And still the AI industry is complaining about how onerous it is.