Tech billionaires Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, alongside venture capitalist David Sacks, successfully persuaded President Donald Trump to shelve a planned executive order on artificial intelligence regulation that had been set for signing on Thursday.
The Trump administration’s plans for an executive order regulating artificial intelligence were put on hold after some of the tech industry’s biggest players, including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and venture capitalist David Sacks, persuaded the White House to call it off.
Musk, Zuckerberg and Sacks all spoke directly with Trump between Wednesday night and Thursday morning, with their argument appealing to the accelerationist faction in the administration, including officials at the National Economic Council and staffers in the Vice President’s office.
“I didn’t like certain aspects of it. I postponed it,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “I think it gets in the way of — you know, we’re leading China, we’re leading everybody, and I didn’t want to do anything to get in the way of that lead,” he said.
The order itself was not a sweeping regulatory framework. It would have established a voluntary mechanism for AI developers to engage with federal agencies and submit advanced models for security review up to 90 days before their public release, with no licensing regime attached.
Musk, whose xAI is a direct competitor to OpenAI and Anthropic, has a structural interest in keeping the regulatory field open, while Zuckerberg’s Meta has similarly positioned itself as a champion of open-source AI development.
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