President Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday establishing a voluntary 30-day pre-release government review of “covered frontier models,” collapsing a 90-day window that had appeared in a May draft and that, per the Council on Foreign Relations, was pulled over concerns it would blunt U.S. competitiveness with China.

The order, “Promoting Advanced Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Security,” directs agencies to work with NIST on the voluntary framework, instructs the NSA to run a classified benchmarking process assessing “advanced cyber capabilities” of frontier models, and gives Treasury 30 days to stand up an “AI cybersecurity clearinghouse” in consultation with the National Cyber Director and CISA. The text explicitly disclaims any “a mandatory governmental licensing, preclearance, or permitting requirement,” a line that reads less like legal housekeeping than like a peace offering to labs that spent the spring lobbying against the longer window.

Trump signed in a private ceremony, having postponed an earlier signing because, per CNBC, he “didn’t like certain aspects of it.” The compression from 90 days to 30 is the policy story; the private ceremony is the political one.

Hours before the signing, Anthropic announced that Project Glasswing, its cybersecurity partner program, had grown from roughly 50 initial partners announced in April to about 150 organizations across more than 15 countries, with partners using Claude Mythos Preview to identify more than 10,000 high- or critical-severity security flaws. The timing isn’t subtle. Anthropic is simultaneously contesting a Defense Department designation labeling it a supply chain risk, and a voluntary cyber-benchmarking regime run through NSA is precisely the venue where that designation gets relitigated by other means.

The structural read: Washington has chosen the 2010s cybersecurity-information-sharing template over the licensing template. Voluntary, classified, fast. Whether that’s regulation or its absence depends on who’s reading.

Sources