WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump called off plans to sign a new executive order on artificial intelligence hours before an expected White House ceremony Thursday because he said he was worried the measure could dull America’s edge on AI technology.

Trump said he was postponing the Oval Office event with tech industry executives because he did not like what he saw in the order’s text. “We’re leading China, we’re leading everybody, and I don’t want to do anything that’s going to get in the way of that lead,” Trump told reporters.

The order would have established a framework for the government to vet the national security risks of the most advanced AI systems before their public release, according to a person familiar with the White House’s deliberations with the tech industry but not authorized to speak about them publicly. The directive was being characterized as a voluntary collaboration with participating U.S.-based tech companies, including Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, the person said.

The push for some kind of government action to review leading AI systems follows growing concern within the banking industry and other institutions about the leaps in AI’s abilities to find cybersecurity vulnerabilities in the world’s software.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and outgoing Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell convened an urgent meeting with Wall Street CEOs in April, warning them about the cybersecurity risks posed by Anthropic’s AI model, Claude Mythos.

The meeting, urgently assembled at the Treasury Department’s headquarters, was intended to ensure that banks were aware of the risks associated with the models, Bessent said at CNBC’s “Invest in America Forum” in Washington in April. “This new Anthropic model is very powerful,” he said. “Some banks are doing a better job in cybersecurity than others, and we want to have the ability to convene them and talk about what is best practices and where they should be heading.”

That led some allies of the Republican president to propose better methods for getting those AI tools in the hands of trusted cybersecurity experts.

Trump’s hopes for AI have run up against voters’ fears of its impact

Trump had pledged to undo the AI safety regulations set by his predecessor, Democratic President Joe Biden. Trump’s administration has viewed the AI sector as an engine to help deliver on his pledges to expand the economy and he has promoted its major players at events at the White House and around the world. Last week, Trump had tech CEOs in tow for a summit with China’s Xi Jinping.

Trump’s ambitions for the sector have collided with the fears of voters over the impact of the technology on American life, jobs and electricity bills. Republicans themselves are divided over whether to embrace the AI industry or side with voters who express skepticism about the technology.

Also complicating the government’s interest in working with Anthropic on cybersecurity is the government’s ongoing legal fight with the company. Trump in February ordered all U.S. agencies to stop using Anthropic’s chatbot Claude after an unusually public clash between the Pentagon and CEO Dario Amodei.

There are competing factions within the administration, said Serena Booth, a computer science professor at Brown University and former AI policy fellow in a Democratic-led Senate committee.

“We do see this kind of public fighting,” she said. ”‘We will release an executive order. No, we won’t. We’re going to sign it this afternoon. Oh, the signing is canceled.’ I think this whiplash is because we’re seeing these fractures.’”

Some of those divides are balancing what Booth said is a “reasonable idea” to test the most capable AI models before their public release, with a concern that government scrutiny, if it takes too long, could burden AI developers.

“It does come at a potential very large cost to innovation and speed of development,” she said. “There is, I think, a real risk here and I do see both sides.”

The White House has pushed back against state laws seeking to regulate AI, saying the measures could curb growth. A new executive order that could have been perceived as government screening of commercial AI models would have signaled a significant shift in the administration’s approach.

At the same time, similar screening is already happening. Trump’s Commerce Department announced earlier this month that it signed agreements with Google, Microsoft and Elon Musk’s xAI to evaluate their most powerful AI models before their public release, building on previous agreements the Biden administration made with Anthropic and OpenAI. But the announcement later disappeared from the Commerce Department website.

White House describes a balance between safety and innovation

At a White House press briefing Tuesday, Vice President JD Vance declined to discuss specifics from the order but said the administration wants to promote innovation while also addressing cybersecurity threats and data privacy.

“The president wants us to be pro-innovation. He wants us to win the AI race against all other countries in the world,” he said. Vance added, “We also want to make sure that we’re protecting people.”

Asked about new models that could pose security risks, Vance said the administration is taking a collaborative approach with tech companies.

“It also does have some downsides,” he said, “and we’re trying to balance that safety against innovation.”

A former White House tech policy adviser who was a lead author of Trump’s AI policy road map said the disagreements likely represent “healthy tension” in an administration that has long been wary of regulating the “frontier AI” companies like Anthropic, OpenAI and Google.

“They don’t want to do it because it’s politically risky in a million different ways,” said Dean Ball, now at the Foundation for American Innovation. Ball said he would welcome an executive order that would get those companies working more closely with the government on cybersecurity but “ultimately, I’m fine with them taking time to get this right.”

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O’Brien reported from Providence, R.I. Associated Press writer Fatima Hussein contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Senate Republicans abruptly left Washington on Thursday without voting on a roughly $70 billion bill to fund immigration enforcement agencies, frustrated with the White House and at an impasse over whether to try to block a new $1.776 billion settlement fund to compensate Trump allies who believe they have been politically prosecuted.

Republicans had already abandoned part of the bill that provided $1 billion in security money for the White House complex and President Donald Trump’s ballroom amid backlash from members of their own party. But the settlement announced by the Justice Department this week prompted even more questions, spurring a push to limit the taxpayer dollars that some feared could go to Trump supporters who harmed law enforcement officers in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

A tense meeting with acting Attorney General Todd Blanche on Thursday morning to discuss the settlement only heightened the frustration among senators. Soon after it ended, Republican leaders announced that they would not vote on the immigration enforcement measure until they returned from a Memorial Day recess the week of June 1, which was Trump’s self-imposed deadline for them to pass it.

Blanche “had an appreciation for the depth of feeling” among GOP senators, Senate Majority Leader John Thune said afterward as a growing number of them spoke out against the idea.

Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, the former GOP leader, called the settlement “utterly stupid, morally wrong.”

“The nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops?” McConnell said in a statement afterward.

The last-minute scramble on the bill came as Democrats have criticized Republicans for trying to fund Trump’s ballroom when voters are concerned about affordability issues — and as some GOP lawmakers have grown increasingly frustrated with Trump.

Several GOP senators have spoken out against the Justice Department settlement announced this week, and many were upset by the president’s Tuesday endorsement of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in next week’s primary runoff against Sen. John Cornyn.

Growing tensions with the White House derail bill

Both sides have acknowledged the tensions. Thune said Thursday that the White House should have consulted Congress before it announced the settlement, which he said made “everything way harder than it should be.” Trump’s endorsement of Cornyn’s opponent also complicated matters, he said.

“I think it’s hard to divorce anything that happens here from what’s happening in the political atmosphere around us,” Thune told reporters. “There is a political component to everything we do around here.”

Trump unloaded on senators in a social media post Wednesday, urging Republicans to fire the Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonoughwho said over the weekend that parts of the $1 billion White House security proposal did not qualify for the ICE and Border Patrol bill. Trump also renewed his long-standing calls for the Senate to pass the SAVE Acta Republican bill that would require voters to prove U.S. citizenship, and to end the Senate filibuster.

Republicans need to “get smart and tough,” Trump said, or “you’ll all be looking for a job much sooner than you thought possible!”

While they have been loyal to Trump on most issues, Senate Republicans have resisted his repeated calls over the years to kill the filibuster, which creates a 60-vote threshold for most bills in the Senate.

Asked Thursday at the White House if he was losing control of the Senate, Trump replied: “I really don’t know. I can tell you — I only do what’s right.”

Hanging over the growing GOP rift is Trump’s surprise endorsement of Paxton. That intervention has Republican senators privately fuming that it could cost them their majority in November as they view the incumbent, Cornyn, as the stronger candidate.

Possible parameters on Trump’s settlement fund

The “anti-weaponization” fund, part of a settlement that resolves Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns, unexpectedly became one of the main complications in the bill after Democrats announced that they would force votes to block it or place restrictions on it.

Democrats have an opening because Republicans are trying to pass the immigration enforcement bill through a budget process that allows a long series of amendment votes. The Democratic amendments would block the fund outright or ban any payments to Trump supporters who harmed law enforcement officers on Jan. 6, 2021.

“The only way for Republicans to get out of this box is to stop backing the slush fund, stop pushing the ballroom, and as soon as we get back, join Democrats in fighting to lower Americans’ costs on health care, on housing, on power, on so much else,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said after senators left town.

As it became clear that the Democratic amendments could pass, Republicans began discussing their own last-minute additions to head that off — an idea that appeared to have support in the GOP conference but could threaten eventual support of the bill in the House or make a presidential veto more likely.

“I think there’s reasonable limitations that can be put on it,” said Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., one of Trump’s top allies in the Senate.

Secret Service request falters

Under the Secret Service’s request, about $220 million would fund security improvements related to the ballroom. The rest would go for a new screening center for visitors, training and other security measures.

After it became clear that Republicans would abandon that proposal, Trump told reporters at the White House on Thursday that “I don’t need money for the ballroom,” which he had originally said would be paid for with private funds. Still, if Congress doesn’t approve the request, he said the White House “won’t be a very secure place.”

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said the effort to add the security package to the bill was a “bad idea.” The bill should not have included the other security improvements, he said, “because it’s just giving everybody the ‘billion-dollar ballroom.’”

Left in the bill is the money for ICE and Border Patrol, which Democrats have blocked for months in protest of the administration’s immigration enforcement crackdown.

Democrats demanded changes for the agencies, but negotiations with the White House yielded little progress. So Republicans are using the complicated budget maneuver called reconciliation — the same process that allowed them to pass Trump’s tax and spending cuts bill last year — to fund the agencies through the end of Trump’s term without any Democratic support.

Still, passage requires sign-off from the parliamentarian and unity from Republicans.

Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., said the Senate’s responsibility should be to focus on funding ICE and Border Patrol.

“When other extraneous things get in the middle of it, it makes it more difficult,” he said.

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Associated Press writers Collin Binkley, Stephen Groves and Joey Cappelletti contributed to this report.

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This story has been corrected to reflect that the settlement fund is $1.8 billion, not $1.8 trillion