Trump postpones signing artificial intelligence order out of concern it would hurt the AI industry

Key points

• WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump called off a signing ceremony Thursday for a new order on artificial intelligence because he worried it could dull America’s edge on AI technology.
• Trump said he was postponing the signing because he did not like what he saw in the order’s text.
• He announced the change hours before the event was scheduled to take place in the Oval Office.
• “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 at an unrelated Oval Office event.
• The push for some kind of government action to vet the most powerful 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.