https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/02/technology/trump-executiv...
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
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.
And lately they seem to spend most of their time in courts trying to argue that immigrants don't deserve due process
So much for "Hacker" "News".
This Executive Order is just an expansion of the existing censorship framework.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/07/28/2025-14...
> Sec. 4. Implementation. (a) Within 120 days of the date of this order, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), in consultation with the Administrator for Federal Procurement Policy, the Administrator of General Services, and the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, shall issue guidance to agencies to implement section 3 of this order.
A major LLM that did not submit to this would be labeled a "supply chain risk". It's unquestionable that every major LLM would go through this process
It even then goes on to say that existing contracts will be reviewed to ensure they are in compliance (reviewed by OMB)
> (b) Each agency head shall, to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law:
> (i) include in each Federal contract for an LLM entered into following the date of the OMB guidance issued under subsection (a) of this section terms requiring that the procured LLM comply with the Unbiased AI Principles and providing that decommissioning costs shall be charged to the vendor in the event of termination by the agency for the vendor’s noncompliance with the contract following a reasonable period to cure;
> (ii) to the extent practicable and consistent with contract terms, revise existing contracts for LLMs to include the terms specified in subsection (b)(i) of this section; and
> (iii) within 90 days of the OMB guidance issued under subsection (a) of this section, adopt procedures to ensure that LLMs procured by the agency comply with the Unbiased AI Principles.
I'm not claiming that this EO is sensible or enforceable, just that it's not prima facie unconstitutional.
Sec. 3
Unbiased AI Principles.
It is the policy of the United States to promote the innovation and use of trustworthy AI. To advance that policy, agency heads shall, consistent with applicable law and in consideration
of guidance issued pursuant to section 4 of this order, procure only those LLMs developed in accordance with the following two principles (Unbiased AI Principles):
(a) Truth-seeking. LLMs shall be truthful in responding to user prompts seeking factual information or analysis. LLMs shall prioritize historical accuracy, scientific inquiry, and objectivity, and shall acknowledge uncertainty where reliable information is incomplete or contradictory.
(b) Ideological Neutrality. LLMs shall be neutral, nonpartisan tools that do not manipulate responses in favor of ideological dogmas such as DEI. Developers shall not intentionally encode partisan or ideological judgments into an LLM's outputs unless those judgments are prompted by or otherwise readily accessible to the end user.
> Implementation. (a) Within 120 days of the date of this order, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), in consultation with the Administrator for Federal Procurement Policy, the Administrator of General Services, and the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, shall issue guidance to agencies to implement section 3 of this order.
They even say they will review existing contracts
> (ii) to the extent practicable and consistent with contract terms, revise existing contracts for LLMs to include the terms specified in subsection (b)(i) of this section; and
> (iii) within 90 days of the OMB guidance issued under subsection (a) of this section, adopt procedures to ensure that LLMs procured by the agency comply with the Unbiased AI Principles.
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?
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...
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.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
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.
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)
"The world doesn't go round. It flips over!"
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.
I strongly recommend open-weight wherever you can. assume any data you pass to a closed model (including opinions or political positions you intimate) will be retained and analyzed in unfriendly ways, either now or ten years from now.
Especially drugs- I used to think all people should have access, but overall I really wish meth just never existed and people wouldn't distribute it outside of specific circumstances. Being able to cause irreparable damage in one moment of weakness is terrible for people who have less control, and for society as a whole really.
He who controls the porn controls the universe. - Baron Amodei
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?
Train it dumb on "systems:, user:" prompt pairs.
Unleash on "system:, user:" prompt pairs.
Guess which you're providing for evaluation.
> 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
- https://web.archive.org/web/20260602130637/https://www.techn... - https://web.archive.org/web/20260520190620/https://fortune.c...
For the same reason the CIA doesn't publish the Windows exploits it finds?
> 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.
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...
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.
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...
China, obviously.
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.
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.
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.
You left out the part containing the “barrels of money” incentive.
A lot more than you think, apparently
https://www.justsecurity.org/107087/tracker-litigation-legal...
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.
(probably a good thing, in this particular case)
must be TACO Tuesday