Everything seemed set for a photo op with tech and AI CEOs surrounding President Trump yesterday as he signed a much-anticipated executive order on AI and cybersecurity.

• But it fell apart hours before the order was to be signed, as a top Trump adviser and some tech executives gave it a big thumbs down. And the president didn't really want to regulate AI in the first place.

Why it matters: Any further delay of the order means more time for infighting and for the text to get bogged down in disagreements among different parts of the government and industry.

Behind the scenes: Before the order was to be signed, Trump, AI adviser David Sacks and some in industry discussed it, sources familiar told Axios.

• The main reason the signing was delayed was that Trump "just hates regulation," one source familiar said, adding that Sacks also "hated it."
• "The whole thing was unnecessary" and "just something doomers wanted," the source added.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, xAI CEO Elon Musk and Sacks all spoke with Trump between Wednesday night and Thursday morning.

• The companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

What they're saying: "I didn't like certain aspects of it. I postponed it," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office yesterday.

• "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."
• Those who have been pushing for AI regulation in Washington were relieved that the White House was finally going to make moves on AI and cybersecurity safety. Now it's not clear when — or whether — that is going to happen.
• Axios first reported details of what was going to be in the executive order this week.

The big picture: Trump has been walking a tightrope between allowing American AI companies to flourish without strict rules while addressing growing public anti-AI sentiment, including within his own party.

• For now, the accelerationists have won out.

One tech industry source told Axios there were also questions about why the order would give the Treasury Department a leading role in finding and fixing AI models' security vulnerabilities.

• Typically, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the National Institute of Standards and Technology have taken leading roles in reviewing and testing critical security vulnerabilities — as well as notifying the tech ecosystem about them.
• "It's not clear just objectively speaking why Treasury is involved and what is their substantive expertise in this area," the source told Axios.

Full story

Open-source AI firm Reflection AI is partnering with the Department of Energy to help power the Genesis Mission, a federal scientific research initiative, per an announcement shared exclusively with Axios.

Why it matters: The partnership is a big advancement for a company that's trying to get the U.S. to embrace open-source models.

Driving the news: Reflection AI will serve as the AI model provider at the U.S. National Labs.

• The company is aiming to be the premier U.S. AI lab for the most advanced open-weight models, where the trained parameters are available to the public.
• The Genesis Mission is a Department of Energy initiative launched last year to accelerate scientific research through quantum computing and AI.

What they're saying: "You can't do scientific discovery on a closed model. It would be like doing rocket science, but you only get to look at the rocket, as opposed to taking it apart and examining the engine," Reflection AI CEO Misha Laskin told Axios.

• "The reason this is the open model base of the Genesis mission is because scientists need full access to the model in order to be able to understand and customize it."
• He added: "It's personal for me because I'm an immigrant to this country, and I moved here because my parents got jobs in a national lab."

What's inside: Reflection will provide DOE with AI models it can customize for its data, and Reflection will use DOE's compute as it is deployed across Genesis Mission research projects.

• Reflection and the DOE may collaborate in other ways, too, per the announcement. The firm will be the "foundational intelligence layer" to DOE's 17 national laboratories.

Full story

The deadline for companies to help remove AI-generated pornography under the Take It Down Act passed this week, but advocates say companies will have to be taken to court to secure strong implementation.

Why it matters: The Take It Down Act is Congress' first attempt to tackle child sexual abuse material and nonconsensual intimate images of adults online — content that has proliferated with AI.

State of play: Companies are now officially on the hook.

• The law set May 19 as the deadline for platforms to give people a way to request the removal of such content shared without their consent. The content must be removed within 48 hours.
• The Federal Trade Commission launched a website for victims to report when platforms have failed to act on valid requests.

All of the major tech platforms have set up mechanisms to comply with the law, but advocates say there is still a major transparency gap on how the decisions are being made to take down or leave up posts.

• The worry is that the gap will result in inconsistent removal processes across platforms and too many posts still being left up.
• Omny Miranda Martone, founder and CEO of the Sexual Violence Prevention Association, predicted lawsuits would give the FTC the opportunity to address the transparency gap.
• "We might see a high-profile case and that might be how the FTC is choosing to provide that transparency in the coming months," Martone said.

Full story

The Trump administration defended its designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk in oral arguments in federal court Tuesday, even as it actively tries to figure out how it can adopt its most powerful model yet, Mythos, to combat cyberthreats.

Why it matters: Treating a U.S. company as a national security threat while looking to use its technology to combat foreign adversaries is an awkward needle to thread.

Catch up quick: The Pentagon claims it's unworkable for the military or its vendors to rely on Anthropic because the company might pull the plug at any time due to its "ideological" views around AI safety.

• Anthropic argues it has no way to control its AI models once they're deployed in classified settings.

What they're saying: The Pentagon faced skepticism from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in Tuesday's arguments.

• "For the life of me, I do not see any evidence of maliciousness despite the best efforts of [Pentagon Under Secretary Emil Michael], who in his memo refers to you as having mal-intent, a bad motive, cannot be trusted," D.C. federal appeals court Judge Karen Henderson said.
• "To me this is just a spectacular overreach by the department."

But Anthropic found itself on the defensive, too. In an exchange with Anthropic's lawyer, Judge Gregory Katsas pinpointed the difficulty of the company's usage policies for evolving AI models.

• "It doesn't really matter whether we focus on what might happen with the one they're currently using or what might happen with the one that everyone knows they will need three months from now, because AI three months from now will be totally different from the AI of today."

Full story