Participation by AI developers would be voluntary, the order said.
Two weeks ago President Donald Trump postponed an executive order White House ceremony over his concerns that a similar policy could dull America’s technological edge.
It was not immediately clear to what extent the order differed from the one Trump declined to sign on May 21.
30 Days to Review
The order said the government would have only 30 days to review an AI system, a shorter time frame than some in the industry were expecting. A longer time period may have been too burdensome for a fast-moving and highly competitive industry.
Trump canceled an Oval Office event with tech industry executives last month because he did not like what he saw in the earlier version of the order’s text. “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,” Trump said at the time.
That directive is a voluntary collaboration with participating U.S.-based tech companies, including Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, which are “frontier labs” because they are building the most advanced AI systems.
The White House said in a social media post Tuesday the executive order “creates a process for frontier labs to voluntarily share cutting-edge cyber models in order to secure critical infrastructure and strengthen the government’s own cyber defenses. We are NOT conducting oversight of all new models, as that level of government overreach would have chilling effects on free speech and innovation.”
What the industry actually needs isn’t less governance – it’s smarter governance,” said Justin Beals, chief executive and founder of Strike Graph. “Our own research found 68 percent of compliance leaders say predictability in government policy is extremely important to them. Constant whiplash between administrations doesn’t give businesses the certainty they need to build AI programs that are both innovative and secure.
“The real test of this executive order will be whether it accelerates a coherent federal framework or creates a vacuum that bad actors exploit.”
Staying Ahead of Threats
“The value of any evaluation framework will ultimately depend on how effectively it connects model capabilities to real-world threat intelligence,” said Josh Picolet, vice president of Detection and Analysis at security provider, Team Cymru. “Understanding who is operationalizing these technologies, and how they end up deployed in the wild, will be critical to staying ahead of emerging threats.”
“The executive order signed today reflects something the security community has understood for a while: Frontier AI models are no longer just productivity tools,” said Gidi Cohen, chief executive of security provider, Bonfy. “They are infrastructure with national security implications.”
Cohen added there is a difference between studying a model alone and what it does once it goes live.
AI in Real-World Environment
“The order’s focus on benchmarking ‘advanced cyber capabilities’ before release is a meaningful signal,” Cohen said. “But benchmarking a model in a controlled pre-release window is very different from governing what that model does once it’s running inside enterprise workflows at scale. The hard problem isn’t what a model can do in isolation. It’s what it does with real data, in real organizational contexts, on behalf of real users – often without anyone watching.
AI systems evaluated as safe at the configuration level can still behave in ways that violate policy, expose sensitive data, or act outside of business intent once deployed.
“That gap between what a system ends up approved to do and what it actually does in production) is where the real risk lives,” Cohen said. “Early access and capability benchmarking are a start. But the governance conversation needs to extend past the release gate and into runtime. Because that’s where AI meets data, and where policy either holds or it doesn’t.”