AI Daily: Trump postpones signing of AI executive order

Catch up on the top artificial intelligence news and commentary by Wall Street analysts on publicly traded companies in the space with this daily recap compiled by The Fly.

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AI EXECUTIVE ORDER: President Donald Trump on Thursday said he postponed an upcoming signing ceremony for his administration’s much-anticipated executive order on the AI industry, CNBC’s Kevin Breuninger reports. The event, which was set for later Thursday afternoon, was delayed “because I didn’t like certain aspects of it,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.

AI MODELS: The Pentagon is testing AI models to see which are most favored by 25 of the department’s “power users,” as the U.S. military races to find alternatives to Anthropic PBC’s Claude, Bloomberg’s Katrina Manson reports, citing a senior defense official. Tests began at the start of March, according to the senior official, three days after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared Anthropic a supply-chain risk over the company’s insistence on guardrails for its technology and moved to drop it as a provider of AI tools. The company is now battling the designation in court, saying it could cost it billions of dollars in revenue, the author adds.

The White House’s Office of the National Cyber Director held a briefing earlier this week or companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Reflection AI over a planned executive order on artificial intelligence that would empower government agencies to review advanced large language models before they are officially released, The Information’s Leo Schwartz and Stephanie Palazzolo report, citing people familiar with the matter. President Trump may sign the order, which aims to establish a voluntary framework for developers of Frontier models to tell the government ahead of time about new AI launches, as soon as Thursday, the authors say. Representatives of cloud providers, semiconductor firms, cybersecurity companies, and banks also were present at the briefing, the authors note. Publicly traded companies in the cybersecurity space include Check Point (CHKP), CrowdStrike (CRWD), CyberArk (CYBR), F5 (FFIV), Fortinet (FTNT), Gen Digital (GEN), Okta (OKTA), Palo Alto Networks (PANW) and Qualys (QLYS). Publicly traded companies in the semiconductor space include AMD (AMD), Intel (INTC), Marvell (MRVL), Microchip (MCHP), Micron (MU), Nvidia (NVDA), Qualcomm (QCOM) and Texas Instruments (TXN).

AI CHIPS: Anthropic is in talks to rent servers powered by Microsoft (MSFT)-designed AI server chips as it seeks more computing power to meet rising demand for its AI, The Information’s Aaron Holmes and Qianer Liu report, citing two people who spoke to executives involved in the discussion. Winning Anthropic as a customer would be a coup for Microsoft, which is pushing to prove the competitiveness of its in house silicon.

U.S.-CHINA TENSIONS: Nvidia (NVDA) has become caught between escalating U.S.-China technology tensions after President Donald Trump approved limited sales of its advanced H200 AI chips to China, only for Beijing to discourage domestic companies from buying them in favor of homegrown alternatives from firms like Huawei and Cambricon, underscoring China’s push for technological self-reliance and the deepening geopolitical divide over AI infrastructure, The New York Times’ Meaghan Tobin and Tripp Mickle report.