President Donald Trump signed an executive order on June 2, 2026 titled “Promoting Advanced Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Security,” establishing a voluntary framework for the federal government to vet advanced AI systems for national security risks up to 30 days before their public release.
The order tasks the Secretary of the Treasury with forming an AI cybersecurity clearinghouse within 30 days, working in voluntary collaboration with the AI industry and operators of critical infrastructure. It also calls for a classified benchmarking process for assessing AI models’ advanced cyber capabilities and prioritizes cyber defense of National Security Systems and federal government information systems.
The executive order was delayed from May after David Sacks, Trump’s former AI czar and co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, pushed to reduce the review window from 90 days to 30. The order explicitly states it does not authorize mandatory licensing, pre-clearance, or permitting requirements for AI model development or distribution.
Source
White House — Executive Order Text · Mashable · PBS
Commentary
This is Trump’s first real step toward AI oversight after spending most of his second term dismantling Biden-era guardrails — including banning states from enacting their own AI regulations. The voluntary nature of the framework is doing a lot of heavy lifting here; it’s essentially asking labs to submit to review out of goodwill, with no enforcement mechanism if they decline.
The backdrop is telling: Secretary of War Pete Hegseth designated Anthropic a “supply-chain risk to national security” after the company refused military AI use cases, and Anthropic sued in response. This executive order reads as the administration trying to thread the needle between hawkish national security demands and an industry that’s increasingly pushing back on unchecked government access. Whether 30-day voluntary reviews amount to anything meaningful remains to be seen.