Trump postpones signing an executive order on artificial intelligence

US President Donald Trump on Thursday postponed signing an executive order on artificial intelligence because of his concern about the possibility of it harming this industry.

Trump said that he postponed signing because he did not like what he saw in the text of the resolution. The changes were announced hours before an event scheduled to be held in the Oval Office.

“We’re ahead of China, we’re ahead of everybody, and I wouldn’t want to do anything that would stand in the way of that lead,” Trump told reporters at an Oval Office event unrelated to artificial intelligence.

The push for government action to examine the most powerful artificial intelligence systems comes due to growing concern within the banking sector and other institutions about leaps in the capabilities of artificial intelligence to discover cybersecurity vulnerabilities in global software.

Treasury Secretary Scott Besent and outgoing Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell held an urgent meeting with Wall Street CEOs last April, warning them of the cybersecurity risks posed by Cloud Mythos, the artificial intelligence model launched by Anthropic.

Picent said at the “Investing in America” forum organized by the CNBC Economic Group in Washington last April, which was urgently held at the headquarters of the Treasury Department, that the goal of the meeting is to ensure that banks are aware of the risks associated with such models.

“This new Anthropic model is very powerful,” Bessant added. “Some banks are doing a better job at cybersecurity than others, and we want to be able to bring them together and talk about best practices and where they should be headed.”

This has prompted some of the Republican president’s allies to suggest better ways to get these AI tools into the hands of trusted cybersecurity experts.