Veto in the West Wing

President Donald Trump canceled the signing of a landmark executive order on artificial intelligence on May 21, hours before the planned White House ceremony, after telling reporters he was worried the measure could dull America's edge on AI. The order would have established the first federal framework for the government to vet the national-security risks of the most advanced AI systems before their public release. (Source: NBC News)

The reversal came after former White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks raised industry concerns directly with Trump. The draft had charged administration officials with building a process for the government to access and evaluate yet-to-be-released models in coordination with leading AI companies — exactly the kind of pre-deployment red-teaming that safety researchers and a bipartisan group of lawmakers have called the minimum baseline of AI governance. (Source: Prism News)

"We're leading China, we're leading everybody, and I don't want to do anything that's going to get in the way of that lead," Trump told reporters.

The cancellation leaves the United States without any federal pre-release safety testing regime at exactly the moment the EU AI Act's high-risk system provisions take effect on August 2, and as state laws in Colorado, Texas, and California begin enforcement. (Source: NPR)

Meta began notifying 8,000 employees of their termination on May 20, cutting roughly 10 percent of its 78,000-person workforce and canceling 6,000 open positions in the same week. The layoffs were paired with a $145 billion AI capital plan and the migration of 7,000 surviving employees into AI-focused divisions. (Source: NPR)

The cuts followed the rollout of an internal program Meta calls the Model Capability Initiative — MCI — which the company installed on U.S. employee laptops in April. The software tracks mouse movements, keystrokes, and takes periodic screen captures, then feeds the data to AI systems being trained to replicate how those employees perform their jobs. There is no opt-out. Mark Zuckerberg defended the program on May 25 after more than 1,000 employees signed an internal petition against it and U.K. staff opened a formal union drive. (Source: TechTimes)

Employees who volunteered for the new AI teams before notifications went out were, according to multiple reports, excluded from the cut — turning MCI into a documented quid-pro-quo: hand over your work patterns to the model that replaces you, keep your job a little longer. Zuckerberg promised no more company-wide cuts in 2026, but the precedent — train your replacement under surveillance, then exit — is now operational at one of the largest employers in U.S. tech. (Source: Quartz)

Mexico is rolling out a national biometric ID system, built on an expanded version of the population registry known as the Clave Única de Registro de Población (CURP), that will require every mobile phone user in the country to register their face, all 10 fingerprints, both irises, and a digital signature by July 1. Phone numbers — prepaid, postpaid, physical SIM, or eSIM — that aren't linked to a registered CURP will be suspended. (Source: OECD.AI)

The biometric database feeds into a Unified Identity Platform that connects the population registry to forensic databases and to data already held by prosecutors, the National Guard, and intelligence agencies, enabling real-time identity searches against the full corpus. The framework includes no requirement to notify a person when their record is queried. (Source: ID Tech Wire)

Mexico's Supreme Court struck down a previous biometric SIM-registration law in 2022 on constitutional privacy grounds, citing the same data-breach history that civil liberties groups are pointing to now. The current rollout proceeds anyway, with mid-year disconnection as the enforcement mechanism — turning access to a phone, and by extension to banking, employment, and emergency services, into a biometric checkpoint. (Source: MobileIDWorld)