Trump Abandons 'FDA for AI' Proposal

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.”