The AI Safety Executive Order That Wasn't

Six days before the White House scrubbed the signing ceremony for what would have been President Trump's first AI safety executive order, tech journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton told their Hard Fork podcast listeners that the administration's posture toward AI "just did not survive contact with reality" — a description that, in fairness to two of the more reliable narrators of AI policy shifts, turned out to be right about the collision and wrong about which side gave way. Roose and Newton identified the cause as Anthropic's then-unreleased Mythos model and the proposition that an unusually permissive disposition toward frontier-model risk would eventually be tested by a capability disclosure too significant to ignore. What they didn't anticipate, and what is now a feature of the episode, is that the collision would resolve in favor of the disposition rather than the capability.