Trump signs AI executive order Thursday — 90-day pre-release government access becomes the structural default

President Trump signed the long-anticipated AI executive order Thursday at the White House with frontier-lab CEOs in attendance. The order creates a voluntary framework under which covered frontier models are shared with the US government up to 90 days before public release — and a Treasury-led cybersecurity clearinghouse to coordinate vulnerability disclosure on unreleased models.

The 90-day window is the load-bearing parameter. It's long enough to run substantive evaluations and short enough to keep release timelines viable. Most US labs already aligned to a 30-60 day voluntary pre-deployment window with AISI; the EO formalizes the upper bound and adds critical-infrastructure access alongside it. The five-lab voluntary regime Microsoft, Google, and xAI committed to earlier this month is now the inheritance baseline of a formal policy artifact rather than a press-release commitment.

The under-noticed structural shift is the cybersecurity clearinghouse. Splitting the order into a 'covered frontier models' section plus a Treasury-anchored cyber section creates two parallel disclosure regimes — one for capability disclosure, one for vulnerability disclosure — that previously lived under voluntary safe-harbor language. For Anthropic, which is currently litigating its Pentagon exclusion, the EO complicates the procurement-versus-safety tradeoff further: refusing the framework is no longer a non-event.

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