Trump's AI Executive Order Lands Thursday With a 90-Day Pre-Release Window for Frontier Models

President Donald Trump is poised to sign an executive order on AI and cybersecurity as soon as Thursday, May 22, that asks frontier labs to hand new models to the federal government a full 90 days before public release. The voluntary framework, first reported by Axios, would also extend pre-launch access to critical infrastructure operators such as banks and hospitals so they can stress-test models before they touch their environments.

The 90-day window is the headline figure — and the headline fight. Several AI companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, pushed for something closer to 14 days, arguing that a three-month review locks frontier capabilities in a closet while competitors abroad ship freely. The White House landed on 90 days anyway, framing the gap as the price of admission for selling into federal and regulated-industry workloads.

The order names a category of covered frontier models that triggers a multi-layer government review process, and pairs the disclosure regime with a broader cybersecurity push: expanded cyber hiring across the Pentagon and national security agencies, plus hardening grants for hospitals and banks. The reversal is striking given that the same administration had earlier cut cybersecurity funding — Axios attributes the pivot to internal demonstrations of Anthropic's Mythos and OpenAI's GPT-5.5-Cyber autonomously discovering exploitable software vulnerabilities.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is expected at the signing ceremony, alongside other lab leaders the White House has been courting for weeks. Inside the administration, the order reportedly represents a middle path: hardliners wanted mandatory licensing, while industry advocates wanted nothing at all. What lands is voluntary on paper — but with federal procurement, infrastructure access, and the implicit threat of statute behind it, the 90-day handover is the new default frontier labs will be planning around through the 2027 model cycle.