President Trump, who promoted a hands-off approach to artificial intelligence and gave Silicon Valley free rein to roll out the technology, is considering the introduction of government oversight over new A.I. models, according to U.S. officials and people briefed on the deliberations.
The administration is discussing an executive order to create an A.I. working group that would bring together tech executives and government officials to examine potential oversight procedures, according to U.S. officials, who declined to be identified in order to discuss deliberations over sensitive policies. Among the potential plans is a formal government review process for new A.I. models.
In meetings last week, White House officials told executives from Anthropic, Google and OpenAI about some of those plans, people briefed on the conversations said.
The working group is likely to consider a number of oversight approaches, officials said. But a review process could be similar to one being developed in Britain, which has assigned several government bodies to ensure that A.I. models meet certain safety standards, people in the tech industry and the administration said.
The discussions signal a stark reversal in the Trump administration’s approach to A.I. Since returning to office last year, Mr. Trump has been a major booster of the technology, which he has said is vital to winning the geopolitical contest against China. Among other moves, he swiftly rolled back a Biden administration regulatory process that asked A.I. developers to perform safety evaluations and report on A.I. models with potential military applications.
“We’re going to make this industry absolutely the top, because right now it’s a beautiful baby that’s born,” Mr. Trump said of A.I. at an event in July. “We have to grow that baby and let that baby thrive. We can’t stop it. We can’t stop it with politics. We can’t stop it with foolish rules and even stupid rules.”
Mr. Trump left room for some rules, but he added that “they have to be more brilliant than even the technology itself.”
That noninterventionist policy began changing last month after the start-up Anthropic announced a new A.I. model called Mythos. Mythos is so powerful at identifying security vulnerabilities in software that it could lead to a cybersecurity “reckoning,” said Anthropic, which declined to release the model to the public.
The White House wants to avoid any political repercussions if a devastating A.I.-enabled cyberattack were to occur, people in the tech industry and the administration said. The administration is also evaluating whether new A.I. models could yield cyber-capabilities that could be useful to the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies, they said. To get ahead of models like Mythos, some officials are pushing for a review system that would give the government first access to A.I. models, but that would not block their release, people briefed on the talks said.
The shift on A.I. has sowed confusion. As conversations between the White House and tech companies continue, some executives have argued that too much government oversight will slow down U.S. innovation against China, the people briefed on the discussions said. But the companies also do not agree on how the United States should move forward with potential regulation.
“The technology is moving extremely fast, and there are few formal procedures, but they also don’t want to overregulate,” said Dean Ball, who was a senior adviser on A.I. in the Trump administration before leaving last year for the Foundation for American Innovation. “It’s a tricky balance.”
A White House official said that discussions of any potential executive order were “speculation” and that Mr. Trump would make any policy announcement himself.
The changing policy on A.I. coincides with a leadership change at the White House. In March, David Sacks, the White House A.I. czar who had spearheaded the administration’s deregulation efforts, said he was leaving the role. Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent have stepped in to fill Mr. Sacks’s position, some of the people said. Ms. Wiles and Mr. Bessent have told people outside the administration that they plan to have a bigger hand in shaping A.I. policy.
But Ms. Wiles’s and Mr. Bessent’s plans have been complicated by a bitter dispute between the Pentagon and Anthropic. This year, the start-up and the Pentagon became embroiled in a fight over a $200 million contract and how the military should use A.I. in warfare. When the two sides failed to agree on terms, the Pentagon cut off the government’s use of Anthropic’s technology in March. Anthropic has since sued the government.
The conflict has made it difficult for some government agencies, which had come to rely on Anthropic’s technology, according to military, intelligence and other U.S. officials. Anthropic’s A.I. is still being used by the military in a system known as Maven, which helps analyze intelligence and suggests targets for airstrikes in the war in Iran.
The National Security Agency has also recently used Anthropic’s Mythos model to assess vulnerabilities in the U.S. government’s software, people with knowledge of the work said.
Last month, Ms. Wiles and Mr. Bessent held a meeting at the White House with Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive, with a focus on getting the company’s technology back in use by the government. Both sides later described the meeting as “productive.”
Officials said that if the administration moved ahead with vetting A.I. models, the working group would help determine the agencies that would help with that effort. With no federal agency responsible for all government cybersecurity work, some officials said having the N.S.A., the White House Office of the National Cyber Director and the director of national intelligence oversee the model review was the best way to proceed.
The working group could also look at whether there is a role for the Center for A.I. Standards and Innovation, an agency the Biden administration established to vet A.I. models that are voluntarily shared with the government. Under Mr. Trump, the organization has been sidelined, people in the industry said, even though the White House said in an A.I. policy paper that the group should play a role in assessing “the performance and reliability of A.I. systems.”
Any of these moves would take the administration far from a philosophy on regulation that Vice President JD Vance outlined in a speech at an international A.I. gathering in Paris last year. At the time, he warned industry and government officials that “excessive regulation of the A.I. sector could kill a transformative industry just as it’s taking off.”
“The A.I. future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety,” he said. “It will be won by building.”
Cade Metz, Kate Conger and Tyler Pager contributed reporting.
