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 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.
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.
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.
It is surprising to me American companies completely absent from the open model space, even though we have historically seen companies doing open source.
They aren't completely absent. Google keeps releasing Gemma models. Nvidia publishes Nemotron. Microsoft has their Phi series. IBM publishes Granite. Even OpenAI released a new open model (gpt-oss) less than a year ago.
I was going to link all of these, some are better than others, but they're all reasonably capable. A lot of these have versions that can run on modest hardware too. Granite was the most surprising I learned about recently, wasn't too good with Zed though.
I think that models like Granite are less known because they aren't clear leaders in any particular area. This obscurity is also another sign of how fast models are developing. If current Granite models had been released 4 years ago, they would have been astonishing breakthroughs at the time.
No one open sources their core competencies, GitHub never open sourced their networked filesystem and Heroku never open sourced their dyno sandboxing code. They open source ancillary tools.
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.
> 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.
I loathe Anthropic. many companies don't contribute to open-source, but for one to be actively hostile to open-source, to the degree they're lobbying the government to ban it, is uniquely evil. at least these gatekeepers call themselves what they are.
scraping CoT won't stop the advance of Chinese models. neither will a US "ban" on using such models. at this point I'm cheering for DeepSeek or Qwen to catch up to Anthropic. I support anyone who releases open weights.
Is OpenAI significantly better so far regarding this, at least publicly? I'm increasing my LLM spend this weekend, and this could impact my decision. And I'll prioritize supporting open-weight models moving forward — already Chatgpt's censorship and surveillance dissuade from asking it genuinely helpful questions.
"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?
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
> 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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
All neutrality has been aggressively neutered in every agency, or the target agency dismantled, in the last few months. An agency either supports the administrations political decisions wholly, or... well there's no "or" because an agency that doesn't won't remain an agency for very long.
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.
Executive orders aren’t laws (an important fact that should be repeated often and loudly). However, there’s probably room for the executive branch of the government to influence model hosts, as a major funder and consumer.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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
> 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.
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.
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/2025/07/28/2025-14...
With land desperately trying to recoup their costs on multi-hundred million dollar training runs, those are some very fine hairs you're splitting.
Which hair is that? My statement was 100% accurate.
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?
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.
It is surprising to me American companies completely absent from the open model space, even though we have historically seen companies doing open source.
They aren't completely absent. Google keeps releasing Gemma models. Nvidia publishes Nemotron. Microsoft has their Phi series. IBM publishes Granite. Even OpenAI released a new open model (gpt-oss) less than a year ago.
https://deepmind.google/models/gemma/gemma-4/
https://developer.nvidia.com/ai-models#:~:text=NVIDIA%20Nemo...
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/phi-4-reasonin...
https://www.ibm.com/granite
https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-oss/
I was going to link all of these, some are better than others, but they're all reasonably capable. A lot of these have versions that can run on modest hardware too. Granite was the most surprising I learned about recently, wasn't too good with Zed though.
I think that models like Granite are less known because they aren't clear leaders in any particular area. This obscurity is also another sign of how fast models are developing. If current Granite models had been released 4 years ago, they would have been astonishing breakthroughs at the time.
No one open sources their core competencies, GitHub never open sourced their networked filesystem and Heroku never open sourced their dyno sandboxing code. They open source ancillary tools.
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.
In business strategy terms this is known as "commoditize your complements".
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
> 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
Meta/Llama: "What am I, chopped liver?"
I thought the thing keeping inference above $0 was the hardware, and even if that were free there's still the tyranny of the Landauer Limit.
Meta Llama is free for many uses but it doesn't even remotely meet the definition of "open source".
Google had to release at least the core packages in Android regardless because it is based on top of Linux and the GPL license would require it.
But they open sourced much more than that, and under more permissive licenses.
The notable exception is of course the google play services, which is also strategic (they control the OEMs with this, among other things).
And the drivers, but that's mostly not them I think (they could possibly have required open source drivers though)
As what we say here in Brazil:
"The world doesn't go round. It flips over!"
American companies are interested in cashing in, not making a good product.
Llama?
> 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
I loathe Anthropic. many companies don't contribute to open-source, but for one to be actively hostile to open-source, to the degree they're lobbying the government to ban it, is uniquely evil. at least these gatekeepers call themselves what they are.
scraping CoT won't stop the advance of Chinese models. neither will a US "ban" on using such models. at this point I'm cheering for DeepSeek or Qwen to catch up to Anthropic. I support anyone who releases open weights.
Is OpenAI significantly better so far regarding this, at least publicly? I'm increasing my LLM spend this weekend, and this could impact my decision. And I'll prioritize supporting open-weight models moving forward — already Chatgpt's censorship and surveillance dissuade from asking it genuinely helpful questions.
Out of curiosity, what's your stance on gun ownership?
> cyber misuse
He who controls the porn controls the universe. - Baron Amodei
Seems to be. What better way to secure your companies future by limiting open frontier models. Government sponsored monopoly?
The US can't limit anything beyond their borders. We ae living in the twilight of the white man.
"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?
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".
That and I'm sure these companies could circumvent the mandatory review if they make certain... donations.
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.
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
> 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?
It's just so Elon Musk gets to personally delay releases so Grok can maybe ever gain any meaningful traction...
> 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.
> 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...
Timing around Anthropic valuation crossing OpenAI and getting ready for IPO ...
So that the NSA can use them to find the zero-days first?
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.
An executive order is not law. Why should any company submit their models for review?
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.
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.
> albeit easy choice imo
China, obviously.
nothing is dooming civilization. These takes are so dumb. Civilization exists because humans want to reproduce.
The Executive Order: 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/presiden...
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.
Is this legally enforceable or is it nonsense via the White House site instead of Truth Social?
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.
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.
All neutrality has been aggressively neutered in every agency, or the target agency dismantled, in the last few months. An agency either supports the administrations political decisions wholly, or... well there's no "or" because an agency that doesn't won't remain an agency for very long.
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.
Models hosted or used by the government.
You left out the part containing the “barrels of money” incentive.
Executive orders aren’t laws (an important fact that should be repeated often and loudly). However, there’s probably room for the executive branch of the government to influence model hosts, as a major funder and consumer.
Who is going to stop the federal government from enforcing them as if they were laws?
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.
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?
> 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...
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.
I foresee more Mecha Hitler in the future.
BigAI contributions/bribes paying off
(probably a good thing, in this particular case)
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-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.
> 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.
> Trump signs downsized AI order after weeks of reversals
must be TACO Tuesday