Scott Bessent has been raising the alarm on AI policy. But the delays keep coming.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has privately expressed alarm about the slow pace of progress on AI policy, even before the White House again delayed an executive order on the subject Thursday.

The drafting of the executive order has exposed tensions between Bessent, who has taken on an outsize role in the policy’s creation, and National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross, according to a senior White House official, another senior U.S. official and two other people familiar with the dynamics. They, like some others in this report, were granted anonymity to speak freely about a closely held policy.

Bessent was displeased in the early stages of the policymaking process with the pace of the administration’s response to Anthropic’s advanced AI model, Mythos, as he and Cairncross disagreed over their respective lanes, the senior White House official and the two people said.

Specifically, he was concerned Cairncross was not moving swiftly enough to address potential risks to critical infrastructure and the financial system, according to the senior U.S. official and the two people, as well as another administration official. The arrival of Anthropic’s Mythos accelerated those concerns and complicated an already fraught policy debate inside the government.

Bessent and Cairncross also clashed over a top Treasury aide requesting access to Mythos without going through an interagency process, according to the senior White House official and one of the two people.

Treasury has played an outsize role in the administration’s response to Mythos in coordination with White House chief of staff Susie Wiles’ office, according to two of the people familiar and a banking industry lobbyist. Treasury’s remit has expanded far beyond the role the agency was expected to play when work on the executive order began several months ago.

Bessent has been “way more involved in this than I ever could’ve imagined,” said the senior U.S. official. The person added that Bessent’s involvement “seemed to grow over the course of the last month after the Office of the National Cyber Director made their initial moves, which were not well received.”

Bessent in April issued a directive that consolidated his sprawling agency’s Mythos response directly through the secretary’s office, following some complaints from the financial industry that too many government offices were seeking information at once, according to the banking industry lobbyist and a person familiar with the matter.

A White House spokesperson said the president’s team “is working closely together” to “ensure the best and most secure technology is deployed rapidly to defeat any and all threats.”

“Sean Cairncross and the entire administration are doing excellent work to protect the American people and our nation’s critical infrastructure while also promoting innovation,” White House spokesperson Liz Huston said in a statement.

The Treasury Department declined to comment. The Office of the National Cyber Director and Treasury’s chief information officer, Sam Corcos, did not respond to requests for comment.

In April, Corcos requested access to Mythos, prompting Cairncross to question Corcos’ role, the senior White House official said. Corcos, a trusted Bessent adviser, arrived at the Treasury Department early in the administration as part of DOGE and Bessent elevated him to oversee a sweeping modernization of Treasury’s IT infrastructure.

Corcos and Treasury have since secured access to operate Mythos, according to two people familiar with Treasury’s role. The agency’s access to Mythos operates in a controlled environment that is segregated from Treasury’s systems, one of the people said.

The senior administration official downplayed any friction between Bessent and Cairncross, characterizing it as part of the early effort to establish clear jurisdictional boundaries among various players, including better defining the role of Corcos. A month before Corcos’ request, the Pentagon declared Anthropic a supply chain risk. The unprecedented move, which Anthropic is challenging in court, seeks to bar the AI giant from contracts with the Pentagon and its contractors. Prior to the supply chain risk designation, Trump also threatened to order all federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s technology.

Since late last year, the administration has convened a principals committee to address AI security. In February, officials circulated a draft executive order through the interagency process that included proposals for standardized AI security practices, research into protecting federal systems and data centers from AI-enabled cyberattacks, and new efforts by the National Security Agency to use AI to identify vulnerabilities in federal networks.

Then Mythos arrived, forcing officials back to the drawing board.

Cairncross, a veteran Republican National Committee lawyer who joined the administration after working on Trump’s 2024 campaign, was tapped to lead the Office of the National Cyber Director in August without the deep cyber background many of his predecessors brought to the role.

POLITICO previously reported several administration officials are concerned Cairncross lacks the expertise to lead the effort, and feel his management style has slowed the administration’s response at a moment when agencies and private companies are urgently seeking guidance.“I don’t know him to be a bad guy, he’s just an election lawyer,” said one former Trump administration official who worked on tech policy.

Cairncross doesn’t use his government email, according to one of the administration officials and another person familiar with the office’s operations. Yet all decisions must flow through him and his chief of staff, Lara Smith, creating bottlenecks and making him hard to reach, according to the senior U.S. official, the White House official and a former U.S. national security official familiar with the matter.

The White House referred POLITICO to X posts from Microsoft Vice Chairman and President Brad Smith and OpenAI Chief Officer Jason Kwon praising Cairncross. Smith called him the “type of capable leader the nation needs on cyber-security” and Kwon said he is “a great collaborator to the private sector.”

Throughout the process of drafting the order, Cairncross has solicited guidance from outside the Office of the National Cyber Director about how the public and private sector can best contain the cyber risk posed by fast-advancing AI systems. But even that effort has come across awkwardly.

Industry officials felt a list of 32 questions his office sent out earlier this month on AI security betrayed a lack of understanding about AI and federal cyber policy, according to four industry officials involved in the rollout.

A banking industry official who has worked with Cairncross’s office on the Mythos response, said trade groups and other businesses spent significant time responding to the requests and bringing the office up to speed on basic aspects of how the financial services industry coordinates cybersecurity and how its regulators operate.

Jacob Wendler contributed to this report.