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.
"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?
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 also directs the Justice Department to pursue criminal cases against any individuals who use AI models to hack into computer systems.
Were we not pursuing criminal cases against these individuals previously? Or have we only just decided to make crimes be against the law now?
Edit: let's all remember, by the way, this "review" period does nothing for security. It exists to allow members of the government to trade on insider knowledge.
> “Nothing in this section shall be construed to authorize the creation of a mandatory governmental licensing, preclearance, or permitting requirement for the development, publication, release, or distribution of new AI models, including frontier models.”
As other commenters have mentioned, it leaves the question what on earth this EO is actually good for. And still the AI industry is complaining about how onerous it is.
29 comments
[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 49.0 ms ] threadIMO 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...
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.
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?
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?
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
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?
> 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.
(probably a good thing, in this particular case)
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.
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.
Were we not pursuing criminal cases against these individuals previously? Or have we only just decided to make crimes be against the law now?
Edit: let's all remember, by the way, this "review" period does nothing for security. It exists to allow members of the government to trade on insider knowledge.
As other commenters have mentioned, it leaves the question what on earth this EO is actually good for. And still the AI industry is complaining about how onerous it is.