Trump AI executive order nears key deadline regulation debate heats up

When President Donald Trump signed his AI executive order in early June, he gave federal agencies 60 days to develop a key framework as part of its implementation.

On Saturday, their time is up.

The fast-approaching deadline of Aug. 1 has been the subject of much anticipation in Silicon Valley, where the debate over artificial intelligence regulation has been raging in recent days. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Nvidia‘s Jensen Huang were among tech leaders who met with lawmakers and Trump administration officials in Washington, D.C., this week, all trying to influence upcoming decisions.

Trump’s executive order, thin on details, asks AI companies to voluntarily submit their models to the government for evaluation ahead of their public release. The president tasked Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and other officials with ironing out the specifics.

When asked for comment about the status of the framework, the White House directed CNBC to a social media post from spokesperson Kush Desai: “BREAKING: Trump White House to meet a deadline we set for ourselves.”

Representatives from OpenAI and Anthropic didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Altman told CNBC on Wednesday that he’s seen a draft of the framework, and that he didn’t have “anything specifically in mind” as far as proposed changes. He met with Wiles during his visit, and was also expected to meet with Bessent and Lutnick, according to reports.

The deadline lands during a tense moment for AI development in the U.S., as the tech industry’s most powerful leaders weigh in on how AI should be regulated, and whether OpenAI and Anthropic, the leading model developers, should be able to exert outsized influence over the future.

In recent weeks, the market has experienced a dramatic shake-up as so-called open-weight models, largely out of China, are showing how quickly they can advance in their capabilities. The models offer cost-efficient alternatives to the frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic, and allow users to download the technology, modify it and run it on the infrastructure of their choice.

Those developments have prompted a fierce debate within the tech sector over whether the Trump administration should move to restrict or outright ban Chinese open-weight models. In almost unprecedented fashion, the world’s leading tech execs have unified in opposing any potential ban.

Nvidia’s Huang supercharged the discussion on Monday by releasing a letter urging policymakers to avoid “premature restrictions” on open-weight models. Huang used it as an opportunity to make his debut post on X, formerly Twitter.

Elon Musk,…