Trump abruptly cancels EO signing event after top AI firm CEOs declined to go
Ars Technica AI · Ashley Belanger · 2026-05-22
President Trump canceled a planned executive order signing that would have established voluntary pre-release government testing of frontier AI models, after top tech executives including Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg declined to attend and lobbied the administration to drop the order.
Appears in
Extraction
Topics: ai-policyai-regulationtrump-administrationtech-lobbying
Claims
- Trump canceled the AI executive order signing after learning top AI firm CEOs would not attend, despite providing only 24 hours' notice.
- The proposed EO would have created a voluntary system for AI companies to share frontier models with the government up to 90 days before public release, without establishing a formal licensing regime.
- Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg reportedly lobbied Trump to cancel the order by appealing to the administration's accelerationist faction.
- Former White House AI adviser David Sacks, whose special government employee designation had already expired, also joined the push to delay the signing.
- OpenAI reportedly supported the signing, while some executives had already boarded flights to Washington when the event was canceled.
Key quotes
Trump had been hoping that top executives from leading AI firms would attend the signing. He decided to pull the plug after learning that some CEOs couldn't make the event.
Other AI executives who quickly rearranged their schedules to go 'were midair on their way to the Oval Office' when they found out that the trip was for nothing.
The push from industry was successful, these people said, because Musk and others were able to appeal to the accelerationist crowd.