The new AI executive order, finalized last week, is less a government mandate than a formalized handshake. After a last-minute call from investor David Sacks, President Trump scrapped a draft requiring 90-day government reviews of advanced AI models. The final version cuts that to 30 days and explicitly forbids a mandatory licensing regime.
The administration treated the regulation like “eating its vegetables,” says host Nathaniel Whittemore. It creates a paper trail for safety hawks like Steve Bannon while protecting industry interests by keeping participation voluntary. The order tasks the NSA with primary testing of models with meaningful cyber capability jumps, like Anthropic's Mythos, but lacks any mechanism to block a release. According to Whittemore, this effectively codifies deals already in place between the government and major labs.
“The policy process looked more like a chaotic negotiation than a standard signing ceremony.”
- Nathaniel Whittemore, The AI Daily Brief
Anthropic is walking back its own aggressive timelines. Despite promising a Mythos-level model in weeks, the company now says robust safeguards to prevent cyber misuse “do not yet exist.” It has, however, expanded access to 150 new partners across critical infrastructure sectors like energy and healthcare under Project Glasswing.
OpenAI’s growth reveals where the real enterprise action is. Codex now has 5 million weekly active users, with non-technical knowledge workers adopting it three times faster than developers. The company is redesigning the tool to manage the “strange abundance” of modern work - finding information across systems and coordinating approvals. A new “Sites” feature lets users turn any AI-generated artifact, like a revenue forecast, into a disposable, shareable web app.
“Users can build an event dashboard or a revenue forecast planner that lives as a URL rather than a file.”
- Nathaniel Whittemore, The AI Daily Brief
Microsoft is betting the next enterprise battle isn’t about raw intelligence but cost. Its new MAI Thinking-1 model lags behind frontier models on some benchmarks but, when tuned for specific tasks, claims to outperform GPT-4.5 at one-tenth the cost. CEO Satya Nadella advocates for enterprises to move from consuming frontier models to building cost-optimized proprietary ones. Companies like Uber are already capping employee token spending at $1,500 monthly.
The order and the product shifts point to a single reality: the industry is prioritizing speed and affordability over restrictive oversight, with an eye firmly on beating China.
