President Donald Trump canceled the signing ceremony for a sweeping AI oversight executive order on May 21, pulling the plug just hours before the Oval Office event was scheduled to begin. His stated reason: the proposed rules could hurt America’s ability to compete with China in artificial intelligence.
The lobbying blitz reportedly unfolded between the evening of May 20 and the morning of May 21. Among those applying pressure were Elon Musk, whose xAI company is building frontier AI models, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and David Sacks, the White House’s own AI and Crypto Czar.
The draft order would have required developers of cutting-edge AI models to disclose various details to the government before releasing those models to the public. It stopped short of creating a formal licensing regime, but the scrutiny provisions were apparently enough to trigger alarm bells across Silicon Valley.
Some observers described the order as “dead on arrival” after the lobbying campaign succeeded. The signing ceremony didn’t get rescheduled. It simply vanished from the calendar.
Earlier in May, the White House had been exploring a softer approach: voluntary agreements with major AI developers including Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and xAI around model evaluations.
Trump framed the decision around competitiveness, arguing that onerous AI requirements would slow American companies while China races ahead unconstrained.
David Sacks holding the dual portfolio of AI and Crypto Czar makes this particularly relevant. His involvement in killing the oversight order suggests his policy instincts lean toward deregulation across both of his mandates.
For investors, the practical takeaway is to watch the voluntary agreement negotiations closely. Whatever Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and xAI agree to will likely become the de facto standard, not because regulators imposed it, but because the companies who wrote the rules happen to already comply with them.