Trump shelves a voluntary AI safety-review order after Musk, Zuckerberg, and David Sacks lobby him

President Trump postponed signing an executive order that would have given federal agencies voluntary 90-day pre-release access to frontier AI models on May 21, 2026, hours before the scheduled White House signing ceremony. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and former AI czar David Sacks all called Trump directly between Wednesday night and Thursday morning to oppose the order. The voluntary review contained no mandatory requirements, no fines, and no pass/fail gates, yet the three tech leaders argued it would function as a de facto licensing regime and slow America's AI lead over China.