President Trump walked up to a finished executive order on Thursday, the one that would have asked AI labs to hand the government their most powerful models 90 days before launch, and declined to sign it. He told reporters in the Oval Office he didn't want anything slowing America's lead over China. Weeks of drafting and several scheduled signings, gone in an afternoon.
What the order would have done
The framework, first detailed in an Axios scoop, was voluntary. Not comply-or-face-fines voluntary with an asterisk. Actually voluntary: labs would be asked to share what the draft called "covered frontier models" with federal agencies up to 90 days ahead of release, and they could say no.
The 90-day number is where it got interesting. Companies were reportedly pushing to shrink the window to around 14 days, which tells you how they felt about handing rivals a three-month head start while a classified review crawled along. The NSA, the Office of the National Cyber Director, OSTP, CISA and the Pentagon would have decided which models counted and how the secret evaluation worked. CNN reported the draft also set up a Treasury-led clearinghouse to find and patch flaws in unreleased models.
The model that started this
None of this gets drafted without a scare, and the scare has a name. In early April, Anthropic said an unreleased model called Mythos Preview had autonomously found thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities across every major operating system and browser, some of the bugs older than the engineers who missed them. The company refused to release it and instead stood up Project Glasswing, a defensive coalition with Apple, Microsoft, Google and others.
Vice President JD Vance said the quiet part on Wednesday, warning that "a bad actor could use Mythos to target various cybersecurity vulnerabilities." The same capability that thrills defenders is the one that keeps national security people awake, and the worry is hard to call manufactured when the model was finding decades-old flaws on its own.
So why kill it?
"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 said, per NBC News. Here is the part worth sitting with. The order he killed didn't force anyone to do anything. No model had to pass review. No internal test results had to be turned over, unlike the Biden order Trump repealed last year. It was the softest possible touch, and it was still apparently too much friction.
Which leaves the actual policy exactly where it sat before any of this: whatever the labs decide on their own. Anthropic's choice to bottle up Mythos is the safety regime right now. That works fine until a company makes a different choice.
Everything that died Thursday is written down somewhere. The agencies are named and the 90-day mechanism is spelled out, sitting in a White House drawer. Expect it back the next time a frontier model does something frightening in public rather than behind a vetted partner program.
