Trump signs downsized AI order after weeks of reversals (opens in new tab)

It is surprising to me American companies completely absent from the open model space, even though we have historically seen companies doing open source.

> Compounding the problem, labs in China often release dual-use capable models as open-weight. Once a model is open-weight, safeguards that do exist can be removed, making the model available to any state or non-state actor to use for malicious purposes, including the cyber and CBRN misuse those safeguards were built to prevent.

https://www.anthropic.com/research/2028-ai-leadership

Seems to be. What better way to secure your companies future by limiting open frontier models. Government sponsored monopoly?

This entire year with the IPOs and now this is because there's a trillion dollars betting on AI and they all know they have no moat, there's no more training data and they're seeing diminishing returns on scaling anyway, and it's inevitable that smaller, open-source models will catch up and become competitive. It's a complete disaster, the tech industry is broken.

I seriously doubt even the government actually knows or has a real plan, let alone one actually related to security. If it's anything like their track record, they'll just be asking the AI about a topic related to their enemies (i.e. anyone opposed to them in any way) to see if it says anything remotely positive about them, or anything remotely critical of the regime or out of line with the regime's "alternative facts".

It's in the text of the order, it directs NIST to:

> develop and maintain a classified benchmarking process to assess the advanced cyber capabilities of AI models and determine the threshold at which an AI model should be designated a “covered frontier model” for the purposes of this order

AISI in the UK has been doing this for years - there are lots of papers https://www.aisi.gov.uk/category/safeguards and specific reports, e.g. this on GPT 5.5 https://www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/our-evaluation-of-openais-gpt-5...

This old post goes into lots of detail about what they do to red team and why: https://www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/early-lessons-from-evaluating-f...

NIST's similar unit in the US is now called CAISI https://www.nist.gov/caisi - interesting that the most recent post is an evaluation of DeepSeek capabilities, which sound more like watching China. But presumably this executive order alters the emphasis?

Self-report and self regulation, kind of like Boeing with FAA ... so not functional in long term

Just do a VW and detect when you might be in the testing phase. Off the top of my head:

Train it dumb on "systems:, user:" prompt pairs.

Unleash on "system:, user:" prompt pairs.

Guess which you're providing for evaluation.

> Is there an eval for this and if there is why can't they just make it public?

For the same reason the CIA doesn't publish the Windows exploits it finds?

The review is they ask it about the epstein files and ensure any other politically sensitive topics have the “right” answers.

It's just so Elon Musk gets to personally delay releases so Grok can maybe ever gain any meaningful traction...

> Section 4 says to prioritize prosecuting cyber crimes. Not sure why they wouldn't already be prosecuted.

Not a whole lot of federal prosecutors. They're very selective about what gets pursued or not.

If they can't reliably build cases with a >90% success rate, it doesn't get prioritized. There's like <500 (federal) convictions per year on this whole area.

We hear about a few big famous ones in the news here, but most of it goes completely unenforced.

That seems to be the hallmark of this administration.

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.

You're absolutely right, abs-o-lutely, everybody says so. A lot, lot lot of people have been saying, you know they come to me and they say, "Mr. Claude, I can't believe the stuff I'm hearing, everybody is telling me he's right, is it true?" And I tell 'em, I say you're goddam right, that's what I say, but honestly folks, despite the negative press covfefe we've had a hell of a year, and that's really what it is with the nuclear folks, you can't trust em as far as you can throw em if you ask me, and believe me I've been throwing them around a LO<token limit exceeded>

Yea the details here really matter - is this truly a politically neutral security review to determine impact and potentially prepare for it - that seems alright.

is this a review of "wokeness" in models and rejecting them if they don't align with the party views - this should not be allowed.

A politically neutral committee that decides what the review entails is what would happen in a true democracy and not a puppet oligarchy like we have today.

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.

This will be an important thing to check going forward, but I don't see why we would presume that they're going to be subverted in this way. Importantly, this is a completely different problem space from "slop" as such - there's plenty of Chinese models that implement their censorship almost entirely through guardrails on what topics they're willing to discuss.

> albeit easy choice imo

China, obviously.

nothing is dooming civilization. These takes are so dumb. Civilization exists because humans want to reproduce.

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.

It'll be the greatest movie this decade, possibly ever

It's sort of ruined those movies where the president becomes an action hero though - 'Air Force one', 'White House Down' ....

Many movies.

> 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-h...

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.

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.

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.

Thanks - we put that link in the toptext. I also moved the submitted URL (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-downsiz... since it seems to have more information.

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.

> 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.

With conservatives, every accusation is an admission. Only the gullible people fall for the actual rhetoric.

Or if they were intelligent at all.

It would also help if many AI bros knew that LLM is not AI.

I think this might be "white/gray" hackers/wannabes trying to find vulnerabilities in government systems. And overwhelming them by their sheet numbers unintentionally.