Killed by three phone calls

Tech CEOs were already flying to Washington for the Oval Office ceremony. Then, the night before, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and David Sacks each phoned Trump directly, and by morning the signing was off. Sacks — the former White House AI czar, who staff thought had signed off on the order days earlier — reversed and called the president without telling his own team.

Sacks's objection wasn't the order — it was that a voluntary review 'may one day become mandatory.'

What they killed was already toothless. The review was voluntary in both the original draft and the version Trump eventually signed two weeks later, on June 2: a lab could submit a frontier model to national-security agencies before release, or simply decline. The final order narrows the window from 90 days to 30 and adds a clause forbidding the government from ever requiring a licence or pre-clearance for new AI models. The coalition's stated fear was that a voluntary check might one day become mandatory; the cure they won writes that impossibility into law.

The episode is less about regulation than about who holds the pen. The Biden-era reporting rules were rescinded in January 2025, so this was the first attempt to put any federal pre-release check back on frontier models — and it was settled overnight by three men. The argument that carried the day was speed: Trump said he didn't want to do anything 'to get in the way of' the US lead over China. Anthropic and OpenAI had signalled support for the voluntary vetting and were overruled by labs that hadn't. So had the base: a poll found 79% of Republicans want government testing of AI before release. The veto came from three billionaires, not the voters.