Trump Abandons ‘FDA for AI’ Proposal
Trump Abandons ‘FDA for AI’ Proposal
https://www.techpolicy.press/trump-abandons-fda-for-ai-proposal/
Publish Date: 2026-05-22 17:33:00
Source Domain: www.techpolicy.press
July 23, 2025—US President Donald Trump announces his AI Action Plan and signs executive orders at an event hosted by the All‑In Podcast and the Hill & Valley Forum. Source: White House
On Thursday morning, Bloomberg, the Washington Post, Reuters, and Axios were preparing readers for the same event: President Donald Trump would sign an executive order on artificial intelligence and cybersecurity that afternoon. The White House had sent invitations. Executives from the leading laboratories had been told to attend.
By early afternoon, the ceremony had been postponed.
“I didn’t like certain aspects of it. I postponed it,” Trump told reporters at an unrelated Oval Office event. Then came the substantive concern: “We’re leading China, we’re leading everybody, and I don’t want to do anything that’s going to get in the way of that lead.” The order, he worried, “could have been a blocker.”
What Trump did not mention was the chain of calls that preceded the decision. Between Wednesday night and Thursday morning, according to reporting in the Washington Post, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and David Sacks each spoke with the President. The order, a source familiar with the conversations told Axios, was “just something doomers wanted.”
By the time the executives summoned to the Oval Office — many based in California and given little advance notice to plan travel to Washington — were preparing to fly, the document they had been invited to witness was already being withdrawn. Yet the President’s rationale for pulling the order rested on a characterization that the text itself did not fully support. Trump had called the order a “blocker.” The leaked draft to POLITICO showed otherwise.
The order was voluntary. Companies would not have been required to submit models for inspection. The Treasury Department would convene a “clearinghouse” with AI laboratories to share cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Agencies would hire more cyber staff. The…
