In September 2024 the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security proposed a rule, “Establishment of Reporting Requirements for the Development of Advanced Artificial Intelligence Models and Computing Clusters,” that would have required companies developing the most powerful AI models to provide information to the federal government on an ongoing basis. It was issued under President Biden's 2023 AI executive order, and it said the government needed the information for uses “where the margin for error is small, including defense-related activities where accidents could result in injury or even loss of life.”
In January 2025, Executive Order 14148 revoked Biden's AI order. The rule lingered on the federal regulatory agenda for most of the year. The agenda now records it as withdrawn on December 16, 2025, with the note: “This rule will be withdrawn per Executive Order 14236 issued on March 14, 2025.” Vishal Misra of Columbia University told The Lever that, as far as he can tell, no general federal rule now requires frontier developers to routinely report what they are building, and that regulators “are flying with a lot less instrumentation than they would have had.”
The Lever reported on September 24, 2026, that the rule died “amid a flood of tech industry campaign cash to President Donald Trump's political machine — and a pressure campaign waged by the same AI giants,” citing documents it reviewed. The largest donation it cites is documented in federal filings: OpenAI president Greg Brockman gave $25 million to MAGA Inc., Trump's main super PAC, in the second half of 2025, according to a Bloomberg report on FEC filings. The rule, The Lever wrote, “quietly disappeared from the U.S. government's rulemaking docket just a few months after” that donation.
What the record shows is timing. No document made public shows the rule was withdrawn in exchange for donations, and no response from the White House or OpenAI appears in the coverage. Other tech donations cited in follow-up coverage, from Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and Elon Musk, are reported with conflicting figures across outlets and are left out here. For Trump's own position on AI oversight, see Trump Says the Only Guardrail AI Needs Is a 'STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT' and Tells Critics to 'BEWARE' and Trump and His Sons Hold Stakes Across the AI Boom While He Refuses to Regulate It, a Washington Post Analysis Finds.