Trump reverses course on AI regulation, considers mandatory government vetting of frontier models

Everything that could go wrong with Trump's AI safety tests, according to experts

This week, the Trump administration backpedaled and signed agreements with Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and xAI to run government safety checks on the firms' frontier AI models before and after their release. Previously, Donald Trump had stubbornly cast aside the Biden-era policy, dismissing the need for voluntary safety checks as overregulation blocking unbridled innovation. Soon after taking office, he took the extra step of rebranding the US AI Safety Institute to the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), removing "safety" from the name in a pointed jab at Joe Biden. But after Anthropic announced that it would be too risky to release its latest Claude Mythos model -- fearing that bad actors might exploit its advanced cybersecurity capabilities -- Trump's suddenly concerned about AI safety. According to White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, Trump may soon issue an executive order mandating government testing of advanced AI systems prior to release, Fortune reported. In CAISI's press release, the center acknowledges that the voluntary agreements signed by Google, Microsoft, and xAI "build on" Biden's policy. Celebrating the new partnerships, CAISI Director, Chris Fall, did not mention Mythos but promised that the "expanded industry collaborations" would help CAISI scale its work "in the public interest at a critical moment." "Independent, rigorous measurement science is essential to understanding frontier AI and its national security implications," Fall said. To date, CAISI said it has completed about 40 evaluations, including those of frontier models that have yet to be released. When conducting tests, CAISI frequently gains access to models with "reduced or removed safeguards," which CAISI said allowed them to more "thoroughly evaluate national security-related capabilities and risks." Through the evaluations, the government will also gain a better understanding of model capabilities, CAISI claimed. And to ensure that evaluators understand top national security concerns as they emerge across government, a "group of interagency experts" has formed a task force "focused on AI national security concerns," CAISI said. Some firms that have signed agreements have signaled confidence in CAISI's testing plans. On LinkedIn, Tom Lue, Google DeepMind's vice president of frontier AI global affairs, said he was "pleased" with CAISI's testing plans. In a blog, Microsoft said that "testing for national security and large-scale public safety risks necessarily must be a collaborative endeavor with governments, while crediting the expertise "uniquely held by institutions like CAISI" to conduct such testing. xAI, which is currently fighting against OpenAI in a trial over which firm's leaders care more about AI safety, did not immediately respond to Ars' request to comment. However, critics aren't sold on the government's plan to vet models and are increasingly dubious of firms whose AI model designs are largely kept secret. Critics suggested that CAISI may lack the funding or expertise to evaluate frontier AI models. And as Trump seemingly suspects, seeking voluntary commitments from AI firms may not create the kind of day-to-day transparency the public needs about frontier AI risks, critics have warned. Further, any politicization of the evaluation process -- like opposing the release of models whose outputs disfavor a certain administration's political views -- could decrease trust in AI. Unchecked, that could ultimately dissuade firms from signing agreements, since increasing trust is supposedly a key motivator driving the latest attempt at government collaboration. Nobody knows what "safe" means In its rush to announce its partners, CAISI did not specify the testing standards that will be used for evaluations. That could be a problem, according to a LinkedIn post from Devin Lynch, a former director for cyber policy and strategy implementation at the White House Office of the National Cyber Director: "Pre-deployment evaluations with frontier labs are exactly the kind of public-private collaboration needed to build trust, safety, and security into AI. The harder question is what 'evaluation' actually means at the frontier. Capability assessments are only as good as the threat models behind them. Our research on the AI tech stack finds that the Governance layer -- standards, audits, liability frameworks -- remains the least mature but most essential. CAISI will need to define, and publish, what it's testing for, not just who it's testing with." In a statement provided to Ars, Sarah Kreps, director of the Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University, said that AI firms should be developing closer ties with the government as AI advances. However, "the definition of 'safe' is contested" and "once you build a government vetting process for technology, you get the good with the bad," she said. Without defining standards, "the process can be politicized," Kreps said. That risks creating a system where "whoever holds power gets to shape how the vetting works." So far, neither the Biden nor the Trump administrations has figured out how to avoid that, Kreps said. Fears of government controlling AI outputs Microsoft's blog said that "CAISI, Microsoft and NIST will collaborate on improving methodologies for adversarial assessments," which suggests that the plan is to develop these standards on the fly. According to Microsoft, "testing AI systems in ways that probe unexpected behaviors, misuse pathways, and failure modes" is "much like stress-testing whether airbags, seatbelts, and braking systems work effectively and reliably in safety-critical driving scenarios." But Gregory Falco, a Cornell University assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and expert in tracking governance of AI, insists that there's a better way. "Government oversight of AI cannot simply mean political review of model outputs, nor should it become a mechanism for deciding whether a model says favorable or unfavorable things about a president or administration," Falco said. Rather than relying on a politicized government leveraging evaluations to control the AI systems that the public uses, the US could build "some form of independent audit," Falco said. Imagine, Falco suggests, if AI firms understood that their models could be audited at any point, how much more accountability and discipline might such a system create? Operating similarly to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), a rigorous AI audit system could create "real consequences for reckless deployments," Falco said. For AI firms facing such consequences, the pressure would be on to ramp up internal AI safety testing, Falco suggested. That seems like the "only viable path," Falco said, since "the federal government does not currently have the in-house technical expertise, infrastructure, or day-to-day insight needed to directly evaluate these systems on its own." Rumman Chowdhury, an AI governance consultant and founder of Humane Intelligence, similarly criticized CAISI's preparedness. Chowdhury told Fortune that "current White House efforts to offer 'sensible oversight' over frontier AI models may sound good, but the devil is in the details." "It depends on their interpretation of these words," Chowdhury said. "Evaluations are a policy tool, they are not actually data-driven. My concern is that this is another political tool that the administration wants to own and wield." CAISI may lack funding As for funding, Congress in January approved up to $10 million to expand CAISI, Fortune reported. However, conservative think tank America First Policy Institute conducted a recent analysis finding that "CAISI remains underfunded compared with peer institutes internationally and lacks 'appropriate funding.'" To critics, the CAISI testing plan may not go far enough to protect the public from the most unforeseeable AI risks. Falco maintains that only independent audits can spare the public from the worst outcomes. "The danger is that government oversight becomes political, performative, or captured by the companies it is supposed to evaluate," Falco said. "The opportunity is to build a practical audit framework that lets the US remain the global leader in AI while creating credible accountability around the most consequential risks." To Lynch, the bigger test may be whether Trump's testing plan succeeds in its mission to evade risks and stoke more trust in AI systems, while keeping a light touch to avoid overregulating firms. CAISI "is building something important here," Lynch said. "The test will be whether these collaborations ignite innovation, protect national security, and produce AI that is both trusted and trustworthy."

White House reportedly considers mandatory government vetting of AI models before release -- executive order under discussion

The proposed review process would give the government first access to frontier AI models. The Trump administration is in early discussions about an executive order that would create a government review process for AI models before public release. The proposed order would establish a working group of tech executives and government officials to develop oversight procedures, with White House staff briefing leaders from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI on the plans last week, according to unnamed U.S. officials cited by the New York Times. A White House official told the Times that talk of an executive order is "speculation." The discussions, if true, would represent a reversal for an administration that revoked Biden's AI safety executive order within hours of taking office in January 2025 and spent most of last year talking itself up as the industry's deregulatory champion. Vice President JD Vance told an international AI gathering in Paris last year that the future of AI wouldn't be won through safety concerns but "by building," the New York Times noted. Lobbying backlash In October last year, David Sacks, then the White House's AI and crypto czar, publicly accused Anthropic of "running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering," in a post on X. Sacks pointed to CEO Dario Amodei's endorsement of Kamala Harris and his characterization of Trump as a "feudal warlord," in addition to the hiring of multiple Biden-era officials to its policy team. Anthropic's monthly lobbying spend grew by roughly 511% over Trump's second term, reaching $1.1 million per month by late 2025, the Washington Examiner reported in early February. The company lobbied against a 10-year moratorium on state AI regulation in the Big Beautiful Bill, supported California's SB 53 transparency requirements, and donated $20 million to Public First Action, a political group calling for stricter AI oversight. Now the administration appears to be building precisely the type of oversight structure that Anthropic advocated for, but with the government holding the keys. The New York Times reported that some officials want a system granting the government first access to new models without blocking their commercial release, and that's (functionally) what the Pentagon demanded from Anthropic before their relationship collapsed. Just this Monday, Dean Ball, a former Trump administration AI adviser, and Ben Buchanan, a former Biden White House AI adviser, co-authored a New York Times op-ed calling on Congress to mandate third-party audits of AI developers' safety claims. Buchanan is also an outside adviser to Anthropic, and Ball is the same official who told the Times that the administration is trying to avoid overregulation while keeping pace with the technology. Carrot and stick The proposed review process represents a softer approach than what the administration attempted earlier this year. In February, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic an ultimatum: remove guardrails on autonomous weapons and mass surveillance, or lose its $200 million Pentagon contract. Hegseth also threatened to invoke the Defense Production Act, a Korean War-era law that could theoretically compel the company to hand over its technology for military use. Anthropic refused. Trump subsequently ordered all federal agencies to stop using Anthropic's technology, and the Pentagon designated the company a supply chain risk, a label previously reserved for foreign adversaries. Anthropic sued, and a federal judge called the designation "Orwellian." But in April, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals denied Anthropic's motion to lift the designation entirely. The court ruled that removing it would force the military to continue dealing with "an unwanted vendor of critical AI services in the middle of a significant ongoing military conflict." That ruling shifted legal leverage back toward the government, even as the White House pursued a more conciliatory political path. The confrontational approach through Hegseth and Sacks gave way to a diplomatic one after Sacks left his role in March, the New York Times noted, with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stepping in. Last month, Wiles and Bessent held a meeting with Amodei that both sides described as "productive," with a White House statement later stating that the meeting had "discussed opportunities for collaboration, as well as shared approaches and protocols to address the challenges associated with scaling this technology." The U.S. behind the EU on AI vetting According to the New York Times's reporting, any potential oversight would involve the NSA, the White House Office of the National Cyber Director, and the Director of National Intelligence. The model under consideration resembles the UK's approach, where the AI Security Institute evaluates frontier models against safety benchmarks before deployment. Per security publication CSO Online, both the UK's AISI and the EU's AI Act have moved further than the U.S. on pre-deployment evaluation, and the U.S. currently has no legal authority to require such reviews. There's also the question of the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), a Biden-era body created to evaluate AI models voluntarily shared with the government. The New York Times has reported that the center has been sidelined under Trump, despite the administration's own AI policy paper stating it should play a role in assessing AI system performance. Congress appears to be moving in parallel with the administration, with the FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act requiring the Pentagon to establish a cross-functional team for AI model assessment and oversight, with a full "DoD-wide assessment framework" due at some point in the future. That team must develop testing procedures, security requirements, and compliance standards for AI models procured by the military. Was Mythos the catalyst? The obvious question in light of all this is whether Mythos was the catalyst for these new White House policy discussions. The New York Times certainly seems to believe so in its reporting, though no sources are quoted as confirming that. Mythos, which Anthropic revealed last month in what felt like a marketing campaign, is what Anthropic has framed as a potential cyber-superweapon, capable of finding thousands of critical software vulnerabilities in seconds, and, as such, poses "unprecedented cybersecurity risks." For these reasons, Anthropic has declined to release it publicly, but the NSA has already used Mythos to assess vulnerabilities in government software, according to the newspaper. This reluctance to release Mythos as a model too dangerous for the general public may have given the administration both a justification and a political incentive to act. The White House wants to avoid fallout if an AI-enabled cyberattack occurs, and is also evaluating whether frontier models could yield offensive cyber-capabilities useful to the Pentagon and intelligence agencies. Independent assessments have questioned the veracity of Anthropic's claims, and Research from AISLE Security found that open-source models could detect many of the same flagship vulnerabilities. The UK's AISI also evaluated Mythos and concluded it was the most capable model for cybersecurity tasks, but didn't dramatically outperform others across all evaluations.

Trump jumps from 'anything goes' to 'strict regulation' AI policy

OPINION When President Donald Trump returned to power, he cast himself as the anti‑Biden on AI. First, he tore up Biden's Executive Order 14110, which had demanded "safe, secure, and trustworthy" AI. He then replaced it with his own "Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence" directive, ordering agencies to rescind or dilute rules seen as obstacles to innovation. In short, American AI vendors could do anything they wanted. That was then. This is now. While Trump has yet to issue a new AI Executive Order, we know his crew is forming an AI working group of tech execs and government officials to bring oversight to AI. Specifically, they're considering requiring all new "high‑risk" AI frontier models to undergo a formal government review before they can be used. That's going to go over well. What we do know is that National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett has said: "We're studying possibly an executive order to give a clear roadmap to everybody about how this is gonna go, and how future AIs that also potentially create vulnerabilities should go through a process so that they're released into the wild after they've been proven safe - just like an FDA drug." Considering that people who ignore evidence now regulate healthcare in the United States, that doesn't fill me with much confidence. Indeed, we now know the FDA blocked the publication of studies showing that COVID-19 and shingles vaccines were safe. Are these the kinds of people we want calling the shots on AI? Be that as it may, the Trump yes-men are framing this shift as a response to escalating cybersecurity and national‑security risks rather than as a broader embrace of EU‑style AI regulation. Yes, they're looking at Anthropic's Mythos and its potential use by hackers. At the same time, they emphasize that they want to avoid "onerous" controls on everyday AI applications. Frontier models that could supercharge cyberwarfare, bio‑threats, or other strategic dangers are another matter. That's quite a change from last summer when Trump babbled: "We have to grow that [AI] baby and let that baby thrive. We can't stop it. We can't stop it with politics. We can't stop it with foolish rules and even stupid rules." Now he seems to think rules would be a good thing. Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution, has suggested that Trump is returning to Biden's policy. Just don't tell him that; he'll have a fit. While Trump and company are still contemplating exactly how they want to rule - sorry, regulate - AI, the Department of Commerce's Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) announced new agreements with Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and xAI. According to these new policy statements, CAISI will conduct pre-deployment evaluations and targeted research to better assess frontier AI capabilities and advance the state of AI security. CAISI director Chris Fall said: "Independent, rigorous measurement science is essential to understanding frontier AI and its national security implications." How to do this? Who will do this? What will it look like? Good question! Too bad we don't have any answers yet. You may have noticed that Anthropic was not invited to this cozy policy get-together. Funny, that, since most observers think that Mythos was the model that broke the "do anything you want" AI camel's back in Trump's White House. That's because the months‑long feud between the administration and Anthropic is still simmering. Trump's team moved to block federal agencies from using the company's tools, and Anthropic is now challenging that policy in court. Recently, however, Trump's tone has softened. Trump told CNBC that Anthropic was "shaping up." If he can't get peace with Iran, maybe peace with Anthropic will please him. On the other hand, we also know that the Trumpies are considering forbidding companies from "interfering" with the government's use of AI models. You hear that, Anthropic? You will toe the line! Meanwhile, Gregory Falco, a Cornell assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, pointed out the obvious: "The federal government does not currently have the in-house technical expertise, infrastructure, or day-to-day insight needed to directly evaluate these systems on its own." Expertise is something Trump's cast of characters sorely lacks across any and all subjects. "At the same time," Falco continued, "a purely voluntary model of self-governance is not enough." After all, foxes are notorious guardians of chicken houses. What I think is going to happen is that AI vendors who play ball with Trump will end up "governing" AI alongside some Trump loyalists. It's going to be ugly. Some regulation is needed, but these are not the people who will do a good job of it. I won't be surprised if one of Trump's goals isn't so much to make AI safer as it is to ensure that the answers AI gives are the ones he and his regime want people to see. Today, for example, when I asked a variety of chatbots who lost the 2020 election, they all agreed Trump had lost. Funnily enough, when the Senate Judiciary Committee asked numerous Trump nominees for federal judgeships the same question, they universally refused to say he lost. For better or worse, most Americans don't pay attention to legal news. What they do, however, is ask AI chatbots for answers. Foolish of them, considering how inaccurate they can be, but there it is. If Trump's allowed to call the shots, I've little doubt that the approved bots will follow in the footsteps of his obedient judges and give the answers he wants and not the truth. ®

Trump heads to China to spread the gospel of American tech while emulating Xi Jinping on AI

Donald Trump is heading to China this week. If his guest list is any clue, he wants to discuss technology with Xi Jinping, though perhaps after the war in Iran. On Monday, news broke that outgoing Apple CEO, Tim Cook, as well as SpaceX and Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, would join the US president. Other guests from the tech sphere include Meta's recently appointed president, Dina Powell McCormick; Sanjay Mehrotra, CEO of computer memory maker Micron; Chuck Robbins, CEO of longtime telecom giant Cisco; and Cristiano Amon, CEO of semiconductor maker Qualcomm, according to a White House official. Jensen Huang, Nvidia's CEO - who is close to Trump but criticized the US's limitations on chip sales to China in an April interview, saying that he didn't want a "loser mentality" to cost the US its edge in AI - will not be joining the president. A major deal on semiconductors seems less likely without the world's most important chip maker, though an announcement from Micron seems possible. In Cook, Trump likely also wants to bring a friendly, familiar face to high-stakes negotiations. Apple's iPhone 17 has proved enormously successful in China, boosting the company's quarterly earnings to their highest point ever. Apple still manufactures most of its products in China, though it has moved a significant percentage of those operations to India and Vietnam. In Apple's announcement of Cook's retirement, the company highlighted his diplomatic skills and said his responsibilities would include dealing with leaders around the world, so visits like this may become a mainstay of his schedule in the future. Whether Trump's trip will foster a flurry of tech deals, as his Middle East visit did in May 2025, will have to be seen. But while Trump trots out the US's best and brightest business people - products of his hands-free policy for fostering technological innovation - his administration is taking cues from China's more stringent approach to AI. China's laws require AI companies to submit their models to Beijing for review on both security and political sensitivity grounds. The stringent policies prohibit not only threats to national security but also the generation of content that Beijing finds objectionable. In the same vein, the White House is getting more involved in the work of frontier labs in the US. Trump is mulling an executive order that would require AI companies to submit their newest models for White House review. The administration has already announced deals with a growing number of big players in the field for national security reviews of their latest releases, including Google DeepMind, Microsoft and xAI last week. The reviews will be conducted by the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), part of the US Department of Commerce. The Pentagon's standoff with Anthropic continues in court over the startup's qualms about military usage and the bureau's designation of the company as a supply chain risk. Vice-president, JD Vance, has requested that Anthropic not expand access to its powerful cybersecurity-focused model Mythos beyond its initial list of partners, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Trump's China trip collides with AI security fears

Why it matters: The U.S. and China both have an interest in preventing each other from weaponizing AI tools against them or letting rogue systems into the wild. * But it remains to be seen whether they can hold a productive dialogue around AI security norms or trust the other to abide by them. Driving the news: President Trump is expected to discuss AI guardrails with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing this week, U.S. officials told reporters Sunday. * "We want to take this opportunity with the leaders meeting to open up a conversation and see if we should establish a channel of communication on AI matters," one official said. Between the lines: The U.S. is using export controls to slow China's AI progress, but U.S. officials increasingly recognize that the two countries may still need shared rules of the road for how the technology is deployed. * Chinese models like DeepSeek are the primary competitors to U.S. models. * Advanced AI systems are increasingly viewed in both Washington and Beijing as economic engines, intelligence tools and potential cyber weapons. That makes cooperation harder, but also more urgent. * Sixteen business executives, including Elon Musk and Tim Cook, are reportedly joining Trump on the trip -- but CEOs from leading AI firms aren't on the list. The big picture: The visit comes as U.S. AI companies wrestle with how to safely release increasingly powerful models that are exceptionally good at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities. * The White House has been embroiled in a monthlong back-and-forth over how to regulate those rollouts, after more than a year of denouncing such regulation. * Meanwhile, the White House accused China last month of running "industrial-scale" campaigns to distill and copy American AI models. Yes, but: It's hard for either country to call for restraint around AI-enabled cyber operations when both are actively testing the offensive cyber capabilities of frontier models -- potentially to use against each other. * In November, Anthropic accused Beijing of using Claude to automate parts of a broader espionage campaign targeting about 30 global organizations. * The National Security Agency, which is behind many U.S. espionage campaigns, is already testing out Mythos. "The topic is important enough and dangerous enough that we should be having engagement with China on this," Melanie Hart, senior director of the Atlantic Council's Global China Hub and a former State Department official, told reporters. * However, the Chinese government used previous meetings on AI safety held under the Biden administration primarily "to gather information about the United States, rather than to be serious about AI guardrails," Hart said. * During those talks, Beijing often sent representatives from the foreign ministry who lacked technical AI expertise, she added. What to watch: Don't expect a single visit to reshape U.S. AI policy overnight. Instead, Hart said, the trip is more likely to determine whether future U.S.-China discussions on AI security become substantive or remain largely symbolic. * "From there, we then need to judge who shows up for the China side," she said. "We want to see the technical experts showing up at the table. That's how we'll know that that's actually real." Go deeper: Trump's legacy week

Trump administration suddenly embraces AI oversight ideas it once rejected | Fortune

When it comes to AI, the Trump Administration has largely positioned itself as the opposite of the Biden White House -- criticizing what Trump's tech policy advisors saw as overly burdensome AI safety efforts and licensing regimes, and embracing an anti-regulation approach. Former Trump "AI and crypto czar" David Sacks best embodied this policy ethos. But the Trump Administration, according to multiple news reports, is now about to engage in a head-spinning policy pirouette. Driven by concerns about the national security implications of Anthropic's new "Mythos" AI model, with its ability to identify and exploit cyber security vulnerabilities -- as well as broader fears around cyber capabilities and dangerous misuse -- the administration is now reportedly considering oversight for advanced AI models. The policies under discussion, according to news reports, include an executive order that would create a government-industry working group to examine how frontier AI systems should be evaluated before release. At the same time, the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) -- the Trump administration's renamed version of the Biden-era United States AI Safety Institute -- announced partnerships with Google, Microsoft, and xAI to evaluate some AI models before deployment. According to an agency press release, CAISI's agreements with frontier AI developers "enable government evaluation of AI models before they are publicly available, as well as post-deployment assessment and other research." The agency said it has completed more than 40 such evaluations, including on state-of-the-art models that remain unreleased. In an interview on Fox Business this morning, White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said the administration is studying a possible executive order that would create "a clear road map" for how advanced AI systems should be evaluated before release. "We're studying possibly an executive order to give a clear road map to everybody about how this is going to go and how future AIs that also could potentially create vulnerabilities should go through a process so that they're released to the wild after they've been proven safe -- just like an FDA drug," Hassett said. "Mythos is the first, but it's incumbent on us to build a system so U.S. AI can be the leader in AI and be safe at the same time. That's really pretty much what we're working on almost full-time right now." The current debate carries with it a strong sense of déjà vu. The original U.S. AI Safety Institute was created by Joe Biden through his November 2023 AI Executive Order, with the goal of helping the federal government evaluate and better understand frontier AI systems from companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. The order also invoked the Defense Production Act to require companies training the largest AI models to share certain safety testing results with the government. In other words, the administration that once criticized Biden's AI oversight efforts is now considering adopting broadly similar policies, even though the original U.S. AI Safety Institute was systematically rebranded and restructured (the word "safety" was notably removed) and its inaugural director, Elizabeth Kelly, stepped down shortly after Trump's inauguration in January 2025. (She subsequently joined Anthropic as head of "beneficial deployments," one of several hires of former Biden officials that may have contributed to the acrimonious relationship between Trump's tech policy team and Anthropic.) At the end of April, Chris Fall, who served as an Energy Department official in the first Trump administration, was tapped to lead the rebranded CAISI, with a Commerce Department spokesperson saying "Dr. Fall brings the scientific leadership needed to ensure America leads the world in evaluating frontier AI models and advancing the technical standards that protect our national and economic security." Fall replaced Collin Burns, a former member of Anthropic's technical staff, who was dismissed from his position after just days on the job, with unnamed Trump administration officials telling reporters that they had not been informed of Burns' appointment. Fall spent nearly four years as vice president for applied sciences at technology research nonprofit MITRE. "The is a 180 for the Trump administration, that has very explicitly been anti-any sort of regulation and also has explicitly tried to block states from enacting any kind of regulation," said Rumman Chowdhury, an CEO of Humane Intelligence and former US Science Envoy for AI. Still, the renewed push for evaluations is being framed less around AI ethics concerns and worry about existential dangers, which was a strong focus of the Biden Administration, and more around immediate national security risks. That backdrop includes the uproar over Anthropic's Mythos model and a broader shift in Washington toward viewing frontier AI systems through the lens of cyberwarfare, infrastructure security, and geopolitical competition. Anthropic itself was labeled a national security threat by the administration after refusing to grant the Pentagon unrestricted use of its technology -- a designation the company is now challenging in court. Trump recently struck a more conciliatory tone, telling CNBC that Anthropic was "shaping up" and that "I think we will get along with them just fine." Chowdhury said the current White House efforts to offer "sensible oversight" over frontier AI models may sound good, but the devil is in the details. "It depends on their interpretation of these words," she said. "Evaluations are a policy tool, they are not actually data-driven. My concern is that this is another political tool that the administration wants to own and wield." But it remains unclear whether CAISI has the funding and authority needed to fulfill its mission. In 2024, The Washington Post published an investigation into National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the agency that houses CAISI, finding that budget constraints had left the 123-year-old institution understaffed in key technology areas and many facilities at its Gaithersburg, Maryland, and Boulder, Colorado campuses below acceptable building standards. At the time, now Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer had announced that an appropriations bill included up to $10 million for the establishment of the USAISI at NIST. In January 2026, Congress approved funding increases for NIST's AI work including $55 million for NIST AI research and measurement efforts and up to $10 million specifically to expand the agency, rebranded as CAISI. But one policy analysis this year, from conservative think tank America First Policy Institute, said CAISI remains underfunded compared with peer institutes internationally and lacks "appropriate funding." The challenge is compounded by the fact that much of the government's evaluation effort depends on cooperation from the same companies building the models. "In 2024, BIML identified 23 LLM security risks that are located inside the black box of the frontier models (and thus managed by the vendors themselves)," Gary McGraw, CEO of the AI security nonprofit Berryville Institute of Machine Learning (BIML), said in an email to Fortune. "In our view, any regulatory guidance should systematically address these risks by opening the black box to scrutiny." McGraw added that BIML is "deeply concerned that the foxes might be asked to guard the chicken house even though they already designed and constructed it in secret." In addition, while AI model vetting is useful, it should not be mistaken for AI system security, said Rob van der Veer, founder of the the OWASP (Open Worldwide Application Security Project) AI Exchange and chief AI officer at global technology consultancy Software Improvement Group. "AI model vetting can motivate model makers to invest more in resilience, and it can help expose obvious weaknesses," he said by email. "But AI models will remain fragile, no matter how much we test them...so yes, test the models. Vet them. Improve them. But design the system as if the model can still fail. Because it can."

Trump China visit: Why AI warfare may feature in summit

As Trump heads to Beijing for a summit with Xi Jinping, AI-enabled warfare, cybersecurity and the deepening US-China tech rivalry are set to dominate talks, even as a breakthrough deal on semiconductors looks unlikely. Trade and geopolitics are expected to dominate the agenda, but United States President Donald Trump's guest list for his trip to China suggests technology will also be on the table for talks on Thursday with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping. Among those making the trip alongside Trump, are Apple's CEO Tim Cook and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Notably, Nvidia's chief Jensen Huang is not expected to join. But rather than semiconductors, the agenda is more likely to focus on Iran, Taiwan and artificial intelligence-enabled warfare - especially following its widespread use in conflicts in Gaza and Iran. Artificial intelligence has become central to the US-China tech race and there are hopes that both leaders will talk about cooperating on the technology. "The big top shelf items" on the agenda will be the geopolitical instabilities created by the conflict in Iran, and also the uncertainty now about whether the US can really be a protective factor in the tensions between China and Taiwan, said David Leslie, director of ethics and responsible innovation research at The Alan Turing Institute. "In terms of how that might relate to AI, one dimension that I? think will have to be covered in one way or another is this new age of AI-supported warfare that we've kind of found ourselves in within the past eight months," he told Euronews Next in reference to the Nicolás Maduro raid in Venezuela, Israel's ongoing military campaign in Palestine, and the broad deployment of AI across various applications in Iran. "I think that there are these issues about AI-enabled warfare that will be salient and on the table in the discussions, because China and the US had already sort of opened up conversations about this, especially with regard to nuclear," he added. The Trump-Xi summit comes several weeks after the American AI company Anthropic released its cyber-focused model Mythos to several businesses and cybersecurity firms. Anthropic said that the model could not be released to the public as it "poses unprecedented cybersecurity risks". Frontier AI models that expose vulnerabilities in national cybersecurity infrastructure are set to be a critical talking point between China and the United States, given the implications such weaknesses carry at the highest levels of national security, Leslie said. But another factor that will be important is the outsized influence that Trump's Big Tech allies have wielded over this administration -- to the point where it could be said that Silicon Valley has largely been driving policy rather than the other way around, Leslie added. This could mean that the US stance on issues like cybersecurity and the alleged theft of American intellectual property by Chinese tech companies, allegedly copying American AI models, may be shaped less by diplomats and more by the tech executives who have become so central to this administration. "I do think that one of the defining features of the way tech policy has evolved from the Trump administration side is that it has all been largely dictated by the interests of Silicon Valley," Leslie said. While the US may have a more company-led approach to AI, China is pushing ahead with education and research ecosystems. Beijing has a mandate to achieve an AI penetration rate of more than 70% in key industries by 2027. China has also caught up with the US in AI companies, such as DeepSeek, which claim to have cheaper alternatives to ChatGPT and perform just as well. China is also pushing for its own chip industry, with Huawei, Alibaba, and ByteDance starting their own chip design businesses. As such, China's AI advances have closed the gap with the US, according to this year's annual AI report by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. According to the report, the US has the edge over capital, infrastructure and AI chips. But China wins in patents, publications, and physical AI (otherwise known as robotics). But there are complex interdependencies between the two countries. China's rare earth minerals, including metals such as cerium and lanthanum, are crucial for modern technologies, and mark one of these interdependencies that can create tension as well as leverage. "I think it's a complex picture, and I think the US in a way is in less of a strong position now than it might have been before," said Leslie. Pointing to the US's depletion of its own military stockpiles of equipment and hardware, the US will need more robust access to lots of different rare earth minerals just to build back, Leslie said there are "changing and weakening elements of the US's position that are also kind of at play and a factor in the relationship". There could, however, be a reasonable case that China could push for the US to ease some of its export restrictions on controlled technologies, which could also help address the trade deficit, according to Jacob Gunter, head of program of "economy and industry" at the MERICS think tank, said during a press briefing. "But even Beijing has kind of shown when the Trump administration has lessened or made exceptions for things like certain Nvidia chips to be allowed to be sold to China, the response from the Chinese side has been basically, no, we don't want them, actually we find it more important in the long term to continue to plough all demand for chips in China to be focused on domestic producers," he said. That said, there is likely a point at which access to the most powerful, high-performance chips would offer China enough of an advantage in accelerating AI development to outweigh the benefits of propping up its domestic industry, he added. Any attempt by Trump to broker some kind of semiconductor or AI agreement would almost certainly face fierce resistance from the national security wing of his administration, led by figures like Marco Rubio, United States Secretary of State. "I think these are basically red lines where we're kind of locked in on these two fronts: AI and semiconductors are two of the many different fronts of the new Cold War that we exist in. "They don't have to include measures on those. On AI and chips, in order to achieve a deal, and I think they'll probably end up leaving these to the side," Gunter said. It is also in humanity's own interest that the AI race is not one to the bottom that threatens human existence. "I think that each nation, each state, finds itself in a very different context in terms of how the technology is evolving within their own environments. And how the innovation environment and the uptake of the technology is being received by the different populations," Leslie said. With the pace of AI taking off, there has already been backlash, or what is being called techlash 2.0 in the US, with data centres being built and straining energy and water resources, displacing entire neighbourhoods. Meanwhile, fears of AI disrupting jobs even in the tech sector continue. In China, the more centralised nature of power has led to more aggressive industrial policies and more control on the large-scale direction, Leslie said. "It's not only been that there's for a long time been a perception that China doesn't want to be left behind in this supposed technology race, but also a deeper sense that the kind of evolution of the technology as it applies within China, will be more in the service of the public interest in some ways," he said. "There have been certain enabling conditions or a greater degree of belief or confidence in that direction, because China's domestic policies on AI and AI governments have been relatively progressive vis-a-vis protecting the population against harm," he added.

AI rivalry overshadows push for guardrails at Xi-Trump talks: experts

Beijing (AFP) - Fears that artificial intelligence could help people design bioweapons or hack into national infrastructure are mutual concerns for Xi Jinping and Donald Trump, despite their countries' fierce rivalry over the technology, analysts say. As the leaders prepare for a rare summit in Beijing this week, policy experts have stressed the importance of US-Chinese discussions on steps to contain the risks, such as a hotline for de-escalation when an AI crisis hits. But with China set on narrowing the United States' lead in the strategic sector, the stakes will be high. "There is a kind of shared concern about where this AI arms race might be going," and if it could create an "out of control" scenario, said Michael Jinghan Zeng, a professor at City University of Hong Kong. "Despite critical disagreements on a wide range of issues, there is also this kind of understanding from both sides" on the need for AI guardrails, he told AFP. The White House recently accused Chinese entities of "industrial-scale" efforts to steal US technology, while Beijing blocked the acquisition of a Chinese-founded AI agent tool by tech giant Meta. In 2024, Xi agreed with Trump's predecessor Joe Biden that humans must remain in control of the decision to fire nuclear weapons. Although little more has followed, Xi and Trump could "commit to some rhetorical signal" in Beijing as a basis for further cooperation, Zeng said. 'Catastrophic risks' The AI cybersecurity threat has been highlighted by Mythos, a powerful new model that US startup Anthropic withheld from public release to stop it from being exploited by hackers. And "if a non-state actor uses an AI model to develop a biological weapon, that could pose catastrophic risks to both the United States and China," Chris McGuire of the Council on Foreign Relations wrote in a recent article. "Over the long term, addressing these risks will require cooperation," McGuire said, cautioning that China's "willingness to make and abide by robust international commitments on AI safety is low". Washington says the latest AI model from Chinese startup DeepSeek -- considered the country's most advanced -- is about eight months behind the top offerings from US companies. To stop Chinese tech firms catching up too quickly, the United States bars them from purchasing the most cutting-edge chips made by California-based Nvidia. China has boosted its domestic AI chip industry in response, and could be hoping to use its control over rare earths as leverage at the summit on Thursday and Friday. 'Intertwined' Top US executives, including Tesla's Elon Musk and Apple's Tim Cook, will accompany Trump -- with Nvidia boss Jensen Huang a last-minute addition to the trip. Chen Liang, founder of Strategic Times Consulting, told AFP he did not expect any "dramatic breakthroughs". Trump's visit will merit attention if he and Xi manage to "shelve the most sensitive issues" while establishing "rule-based tracks" on points of cooperation, Chen said. But competition is likely to remain stiff "in high-tech sectors like AI chips that directly involve the core interests of both sides". Beijing has refuted accusations made by the White House of large-scale Chinese AI "distillation" of US rivals -- a practice often used by companies to create cheaper, smaller versions of their own models. Meanwhile, China's top economic planning body has blocked Meta's $2-billion bid for China-founded, Singapore-based AI agent startup Manus. The move, which followed a regulatory review, has been seen as a sign of China's growing oversight of its AI sector. Yet "the talent, capital, and supply chains underpinning the field are deeply intertwined across the United States and China," said Grace Shao, a China AI analyst and author of the AI Proem newsletter. "Any delusion of full decoupling isn't realistic on any near-term horizon", she told AFP. "Leadership in the technology... will define the next decade of productivity and growth, so it's in everyone's interest that the two superpowers find common ground on sensible guardrails for AI."

What's behind Washington's AI safety pivot

Why it matters: What happens next could be the turning point for how the Trump White House handles the proliferation of the most advanced AI models in the world. * And there are new reports of possible coordination between the two countries that are fiercely competing on AI development -- a signal that neither side wants a dangerous arms race. Driving the news: A fire-alarm moment is happening: * The pro-AI growth administration is realizing it may need more guardrails than originally thought, and may not want to go it alone. * There are new signs that the administration may consider executive action to rein in the most powerful AI models. * At the same time, the U.S. and China are weighing official discussions about AI, and it could be added to next week's Beijing summit between Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, the Wall Street Journal reported this week. What they're saying: National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett suggested this week that the administration is considering an executive order, hinting at an oversight process for new AI models that would be similar to Food and Drug Administration approval of new drugs. * "We're studying, possibly an executive order to give a clear roadmap to everybody about how this is going to go and how future AIs that also potentially create vulnerabilities should go through a process so that they're released to the wild after they've been proven safe, just like an FDA drug," Hassett told Fox Business on Wednesday. White House chief of staff Susie Wiles also weighed in with a more general statement on X Wednesday night: * "When it comes to AI and cyber security, President Trump and his administration are not in the business of picking winners and losers. This administration has one goal; ensure the best and safest tech is deployed rapidly to defeat any and all threats," Wiles wrote. * "We appreciate the effort being made by the frontier labs to ensure that goal is met." Zoom in: Wiles mentioned "safety" three times in her post. Compare that to Vice President JD Vance's comments on AI in February 2025 at the AI Action Summit in Paris: * "We need international regulatory regimes that foster the creation of AI technology, rather than strangles it," he said. "The AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety." The latest: The government appears to be mulling a number of executive actions to possibly announce before Trump goes to China, sources tell Axios, cautioning that all talks are in flux and nothing is final. * As Axios has been reporting, the possible measures include an executive action focused on AI and cybersecurity; one related to deployment and testing of new AI models; and another that could be some form of licensing or approval around limitations a model provider could place on government use of AI. * This week, White House meetings have included both tech and financial services companies, one source familiar with the discussions told Axios, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wanting banks to be looped into whatever happens. * Google, xAI and Microsoft also signed pre-deployment testing deals this week with the Center for AI Standards and Innovation, part of the Department of Commerce, and announced continued deals with Anthropic and OpenAI. The other side: "The White House continues to balance advancing innovation and ensuring security in our AI policymaking. The Chief of Staff's X post reiterated this longtime commitment," a White House official said. Reality check: A rhetorical shift is just that until the administration announces concrete steps beyond this week's hints.

The Elon Musk-OpenAI trial is producing more heat than light in the debate over who should control AI | Fortune

Hello and welcome to Eye on AI...In this edition: Sparks fly as Musk and Brockman testify in battle over OpenAI's restructuring...the White House does a 180 degree U-turn on AI regulation and may begin reviewing AI models prior to release...OpenAI and Anthropic both target PE-backed companies with new joint ventures...a breakthrough in a foundation model for robotics...AI scientists may still be a ways off. People in Silicon Valley and far beyond have been enthralled by the drama playing out in a courtroom in Oakland, California, where a jury is currently hearing testimony in Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI cofounders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. The judge and jurors in the case (the jury's verdict is merely advisory) will need to decide whether Altman's and Brockman's communications with Musk around the formation of OpenAI established a formal "charitable trust" and whether Altman and Brockman subsequently violated that trust when they restructured OpenAI so that its non-profit board no longer had sole control over its for-profit arm. They will also have to decide on Musk's allegations that Altman and Brockman unjustly enriched themselves as OpenAI re-oriented from a research-oriented lab to being primarily a commercial entity. Most legal analysts say Musk's case is weak and that he's likely to lose. In fact, I'm surprised the case has even come to trial. I thought that Musk would opt to settle at the last minute. I had long-assumed that this was one of those legal cases where the lawsuit itself was the whole point, not whether Musk ultimately prevailed. I thought his intention was two-fold: 1) to sow enough investor doubt about the viability of OpenAI's new for-profit company structure to make it harder for OpenAI to raise further investment and possibly go for an IPO and 2) to use the discovery process to surface lots of embarrassing emails, internal documents, and details about Altman, Brockman, and the constant drama at OpenAI that would tarnish the reputation of his former cofounders. So far, it's not clear the litigation has had much impact on OpenAI's ability to continue to raise money. It has held several successful funding rounds since Musk filed his suit, including an additional $122 billion fundraise at a $852 billion valuation that closed in March. An IPO still appears to be on the cards -- and to the extent that it is looking shaky, it has nothing to do with Musk's lawsuit. But plenty of documents have emerged that paint Altman and Brockman in a less than flattering light and those documents have helped feed lots of media coverage about internal strife at OpenAI. So you might think Musk would say: blows landed, mission accomplished, time to cut bait. Yet Musk apparently thought there was more potential to damage that could be done by going to trial. We know this because Musk said so explicitly in an email to Brockman on the eve of the trial -- an email that OpenAI's lawyers made public on Sunday and tried, unsuccessfully, to have admitted into evidence. According to OpenAI's lawyers, Musk reached out to Brockman about discussing a settlement of the case in the week before the trial. Brockman suggested that both sides drop their respective claims (OpenAI has counter-sued Musk claiming harassment.) Musk wrote back that "By the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America. If you insist, so it will be." The email was a spectacular moment in a trial that has, so far, resulted in few bombshell revelations on the witness stand. That's because much of the sensational stuff has already been disclosed in the documents that surfaced through the pre-trial discovery process. Hearing those details repeated on the stand doesn't change the public narrative much. There have been a couple of wowzer moments though: One was Musk's admission that his AI company, xAI, had trained its Grok model in part by 'distilling' OpenAI's GPT models. Distillation is the process of training a model on the answers from another model. This tactic violates OpenAI's terms of service, so it is likely that this was done using fake or fraudulent OpenAI accounts, and Musk's admission to this conduct was something of a bombshell. Musk's excuse was essentially "everyone does it." The other startling moments so far came in Monday's testimony from Brockman, which included a number of potentially damaging moments. Brockman acknowledged he never followed through on his own initial pledge to donate $100,000 to OpenAI's non-profit when it was set up, but now has a stake in the for-profit company worth $30 billion. Musk's lawyers also questioned Brockman about his own journal entries from November 2017 in which he wrote about being "warm to steal the nonprofit from [Musk] to convert to b corp without him." He also wrote, "[Musk's] story will correctly be that we weren't honest with him in the end about still wanting to do for profit just without him." Brockman's words may prove damning, since they seem to confirm some of the key allegations Musk makes in his suit. So too may be Brockman's admission that he was an investor in the AI chip startup Cerebras at the time OpenAI was discussing a potential acquisition of the company and that he never disclosed his investment to Musk. Altman was also a Cerebras investor. That may help Musk's attorneys make the case for unjust enrichment although the merger proposal did not go ahead. (OpenAI did later sign a major partnership with Cerebras that significantly boosted the chip startup's valuation.) Still, it's far from certain Musk will prevail, either legally, or in shifting public opinion against his one-time-cofounders-turned-bitter-rivals, Brockman and Altman. In many ways, the trial is a distraction, generating much more heat than it is shedding light on the bigger concerns about who controls AI and the risks the technology presents. While the Musk-OpenAI courtroom showdown has been billed as the first great technology trial of the AI era, a legal showdown that matters far more will take place two weeks from now in a courtroom in Washington, D.C. That's when a federal appeals court panel will hear arguments in Anthropic's challenge to the 'supply chain risk' designation the Trump Administration slapped on it for refusing to agree to its specified contract terms for providing its AI models to the U.S. military. That's a case with huge implications not just for Anthropic and the fate of the AI industry, but also for the balance of power between the state and industry more generally. Even as that case moves forward, the ground is shifting in D.C. Anthropic's Mythos model, with its powerful cyber capabilities, combined with growing public fears about AI technology, seem to have convinced the Trump administration to perform a head-spinning U-turn: moving from a highly-laissez faire approach to AI to a mandate that the government receive early access to AI models and essentially license their release to the wider public. (More on that in the news section below.) This policy reversal may not have the drama of a trial, but it matters far more for the shape of AI development. But before we get to the news: Do you want to learn more about how AI is likely to reshape your industry? Do you want to hear insights from some of tech's savviest executives and mingle with some of the best investors, thinkers, and builders in Silicon Valley and beyond? Do you like fly fishing or hiking? Well, then come join me and my fellow Fortune Tech co-chairs in Aspen, Colo., for Fortune Brainstorm Tech, the year's best technology conference. And this year will be even more special because we are celebrating the 25th anniversary of the conference's founding. We will hear from CEOs such as Carol Tomé from UPS, Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy, Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf, Yahoo! CEO Jim Lanzone, and many more. There are AI aces like Boris Cherny, who heads Claude Code at Anthropic, and Sara Hooker, who is cofounder and CEO of Adaption Labs. And there are tech luminaries such as Steve Case and Meg Whitman. And you, of course! Apply to attend here. UK-based Google DeepMind workers vote to unionize over military AI contracts amid internal backlash over its Pentagon deal -- by Beatrice Nolan Employee revolt once forced Google to back off on military contracts. But, in the wake of a new Pentagon AI contract, their leverage appears limited -- by Beatrice Nolan A decade after the 'Godfather of AI' said radiologists were obsolete, their salaries are up to $571K and demand is growing fast -- by Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez White House looks to control access to advanced AI models. The Trump administration -- which spent the past year tearing up the Biden-era AI rulebook -- is now weighing an executive order to convene a working group of tech executives and officials to design frontier-model oversight, with a formal pre-release review process reportedly among the options on the table, the New York Times reports citing sources familiar with the deliberations. White House officials briefed Anthropic, Google and OpenAI on the plans last week, and some inside the administration are pushing for a system that would give the government first access to new models but without the ability to block their release. The abrupt policy shift has been driven in part by Anthropic's Mythos model, whose cyber-vulnerability discovery capabilities prompted the company to withhold a public release, and by mounting bipartisan public concern about AI's impact on jobs, energy, education and mental health. It also tracks a leadership change at the West Wing: AI czar David Sacks departed in March, and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent -- who recently held a "productive" meeting with Dario Amodei aimed at thawing the Pentagon-Anthropic standoff -- have stepped in to shape policy. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that Google, Microsoft, and xAI have already agreed to give early access to their advanced models to the U.S. government. It also reported previously that the White House has opposed Anthropic sharing Mythos with more companies to help them safeguard their systems -- although it is unclear if this is because it fears that sharing the model more widely will increase the chance it will wind up in the hands of bad actors or because it wants to hoard Mythos' potential offensive cyber capabilities for itself and doesn't want more companies using it to harden their defenses. OpenAI and Anthropic both set up companies to push AI into private equity-backed companies. The two AI rivals unveiled competing joint ventures within minutes of each other on Monday, both designed to push their AI tools deep into the operations of private equity-backed companies. OpenAI's "Deployment Company" drew more than $4 billion from 19 investors -- led by TPG, Brookfield Asset Management, Advent and Bain Capital, with Dragoneer and SoftBank also participating -- at a $10 billion valuation, with OpenAI itself contributing capital and retaining majority control. The PE backers were, according to press reports citing leaked documents, offered a 17.5% guaranteed annual return floor over five years. Anthropic's $1.5 billion vehicle, by contrast, is anchored by Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Goldman Sachs -- with General Atlantic, Leonard Green, Apollo, GIC and Sequoia also backing it. It is targeting mid-sized businesses, and will see "forward-deployed engineers" sent to implement Anthropic's AI models inside those companies. You can read more from the Wall Street Journal here and Bloomberg here. Anthropic announces new financial services agents. The company debuted 10 new AI agents built for banks and financial services firms -- handling tasks like building pitchbooks, closing the books, and drafting credit memos -- as it deepens its push into a sector that's central to its enterprise strategy ahead of an anticipated IPO this year. Anthropic's arch rival OpenAI has also been targeting financial services use cases, but the new roll out also puts Anthropic in more direct competition with vendors like Microsoft and Salesforce, as well as specialist financial data providers such as Bloomberg and Alpha Sense. Read more from the Wall Street Journal here. SAP moves to stop OpenClaw and other third-party agents from using its software. SAP last month told customers it could throttle, suspend or terminate access for those using unauthorized external AI agents to pull data from its apps -- an escalation in the brewing data wars between incumbent enterprise software vendors and vendors of AI tools, the Information reports. SAP has its own AI agent called Joule, but many customers prefer the functionality that third-party agents have to handle workflows across many different software applications. SAP CEO Christian Klein framed the move as protection against "mass data requests" that strain performance and as a defense of SAP's proprietary semantic models, but the policy lands amid clear signs of pressure: SAP shares are down roughly 28% this year and longtime customer Mercedes-Benz has cut its SAP instances by 40% in recent months while leaning on its own and frontier-lab AI models to clean and analyze data. SAP says it already permits agents from some other companies, including Microsoft, Google, Amazon and IBM, and hinted at "agentic integration architectures" with Anthropic -- suggesting Claude Code or Cowork access may be close -- while singling out open-source harnesses like OpenClaw as a security risk. SAP's stance mirrors that of Workday, Salesforce and ServiceNow, which have all made moves to erect some form of tollgates around their data. OpenAI changes privacy policy to share user data with advertisers. OpenAI updated its U.S. privacy policy on April 30 to allow the use of cookies and limited identifiers (like email addresses or cookie IDs) to promote its products on third-party websites and measure ad effectiveness, Wired reported. The company has said, however, that ChatGPT conversations remain private and aren't shared with marketing partners. Wired found that this marketing tracking was enabled by default for free accounts but off by default for Plus and Enterprise subscribers, with users able to opt out by changing a toggle in account settings. The change comes as OpenAI expands its own in-product advertising (rolling out ads beneath ChatGPT outputs in February) and prepares for a potential IPO later this year, with the off-platform ads aimed largely at converting free users into paying subscribers. Foundation models for robotics makes a big leap forward. Physical Intelligence, a San Francisco-based company with some pedigreed cofounders (ex-Google DeepMind and both Stanford and UC Berkeley robotics profs) that builds foundation models for robotics, achieved a breakthrough with a new foundation model called π0.7. The model can recombine learned skills to handle new situations, something large language models can do, but which has proved elusive in physical AI. A single π0.7 model can fold laundry, operate an espresso machine, peel vegetables, and take out the trash without any task-specific fine-tuning, matching the performance of specialized models trained for each individual task. More striking, π0.7 showed that it could transfer those skills between different brands and types of robots without additional training -- although here the performance only matched that of a human operator who had never done the task before operating the robot by remote control. The team also showed it can be "coached" through entirely new multi-stage tasks, such as loading a sweet potato into an air fryer, using only verbal step-by-step instructions. All of this is a pretty big deal that will make it far easier for more companies to begin to deploy robots in more settings far faster than before. One of the big breakthroughs that Physical Intelligence made was in what they call "diverse context conditioning" -- training the model not just on what to do but on rich metadata describing how each demonstration went, including quality scores, speed, mistakes, and AI-generated images of intermediate subgoals. The meta data labels seem to be key, helping the model learn which intermediate actions were most likely to result in success. You can read the research paper here on arxiv.org and see the company's blog on π0.7 here. July 6-11: International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), Seoul, South Korea. Maybe AI scientists aren't so close after all. There's been a lot of hype recently about how fast AI scientists are coming along and that AI models will soon be able to automate scientific research. AI research itself certainly seems on the cusp of automation with AI, and there have been promising experiments in other fields, such as drug discovery and material discovery. But researchers from Germany's Friedrich Schiller University Jena and the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi found that large language models (they tested OpenAI's GPT-4o and GPT-OSS, as well as Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4.5) that have not been specifically trained to act as AI scientists, can produce scientific results that seem superficially valid but actually lack key evidence and reasoning steps. The results are actually pretty abysmal. Hypotheses were stated but left untested by experiments in 63% of cases. In 68% of cases, the models failed to incorporate available experimental evidence into their process. In 71% of reasoning traces, the models' hypotheses are not updated in the face of counter-evidence. Only 26% of reasoning traces showed any belief revision based on new evidence from experiments. Using multiple experiments and independent lines of evidence to bear on a single hypothesis occurred in less than 10% of cases. Results like these make it seem like scientists' jobs will be safe for quite a while longer than some AI boosters claim. You can read the research here. AI is becoming an even more useful -- and dangerous -- tool as it gets smarter. Fortune AI Editor Jeremy Kahn breaks down best practices for deploying AI agents, how to protect your data from AI-powered cyberattacks, and just how smart AI can really get. Watch the playbook.

The death of AI idealism

Why it matters: OpenAI and Anthropic were founded on the idea that AI would be deployed in ways that prioritized safety and the public good. Now those principles are giving way to an arms race for market share, as those companies and others release ever more powerful models. The big picture: The men behind today's biggest AI labs often pitched themselves as a safer, less-greedy alternative to earlier tech leaders. * Acknowledging the breathtaking power of AI, they first rejected Silicon Valley's "move fast and break things" ethos. * Now, AI behemoths are locked in an escalating competition for enterprise, consumer and government business. * When the Pentagon blacklisted Anthropic because it wanted to restrict how its AI could be used -- including for mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons -- rivals swooped in and agreed to the "all lawful use" terms Anthropic had rejected. * Meanwhile, just last week the Pentagon reached an agreement allowing Google's Gemini models to be used for "any lawful government purpose," Axios' Maria Curi confirmed. Flashback: Altman and Musk co-founded OpenAI in large part out of a desire to develop artificial general intelligence before Google and its AI chief Demis Hassabis. * Musk was obsessed with the idea of Hassabis and his corporate bosses dominating the world's most powerful technology. * Hassabis, for his part, was focused more on AI's potential to cure diseases and power new scientific discoveries. Zoom in: Musk's court case centers on his argument that Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman should not be trusted with a for-profit AI company. * One big problem: Musk runs xAI, his own for-profit OpenAI rival. His argument asks jurors to distrust OpenAI's profit motive while overlooking his own. * "I suspect that there are a number of people who do not want to put the future of humanity in Mr. Musk's hands," U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers told the trial's lawyers. The case also hinges on the belief that AI is, in fact, a danger to humanity. * Musk used his first two days of testimony in Oakland to repeat his fears that AI could kill us all. * On his third day, Judge Gonzalez Rogers cut off that line of argument, warning that AI catastrophe and extinction were outside the scope of the case. Context: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei straddles both visions of AI, touting his startup as a safer version of what came before while also warning AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. He called AI a "serious civilizational challenge" that will "test who we are as a species." * Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently argued that these apocalyptic warnings are themselves dangerous, saying the AI CEOs who use them (presumably Amodei) have "a god complex." Driving the news: In testimony Monday, OpenAI president Greg Brockman acknowledged that he helped launch OpenAI as a nonprofit AI lab and agreed with its original promise to advance AI "to benefit humanity as a whole," free from the need to generate financial returns. * He also acknowledged that his stake in OpenAI's for-profit arm may now be worth more than $20 billion, perhaps closer to $30 billion. The latest: The New York Times reported Monday that the Trump administration -- which has taken a laissez-faire approach to regulating AI -- is considering new oversight. * Per the report, the White House is considering creating a working group of tech execs and government officials to vet the safety of new AI models before they're publicly released. * Axios reported other details of the emerging plan. What we're watching: Testimony in the Musk trial continues this week to determine if OpenAI's change in structure comprised its original mission or preserved it. Bottom line: It's all a far cry from the do-good idealism AI's founders once prided themselves on.

Trump, Xi to huddle in China as AI race heats up

President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will have the rare chance this week to directly discuss artificial intelligence as both countries race to dominate the field while managing the risks of advanced models. The talks come at a pivotal time for the Trump administration, as new models like Anthropic's Mythos force the White House to rethink its AI policy. After laying out a pro-innovation approach that focused on staying ahead of China during the start of his term, Trump and top advisers have grown more concerned about the potential safety risks of new AI models. Technology policy experts are watching closely for how this pivot could influence this week's bilateral talks, along with potential discussions over chip exports, competition and a new communications channel between the countries. "The name of the game is coordination, not cooperation," said Ryan Fedasiuk, a fellow for China and technology at the American Enterprise Institute and a former adviser for U.S.-China bilateral affairs at the State Department. "It's impossible to ignore the reality that AI systems have become incredibly capable," Fedasiuk told The Hill, adding, "Both countries face a pressure from the public to take AI seriously because it's a serious issue in May 2026, where it had been kind of a novelty throughout 2025." White House officials suggested on Sunday talks about AI could include ways to open up a communications channel for the two nations to discuss technology developments. "Like in many areas of intense focus for the US and China, it's good to have a channel of communication," a second official said, adding, "What that channel of communication looks like and its formality ... is yet to be determined. But we want to take this opportunity with the leaders meeting to open up a conversation and see if we should establish a channel of communication on AI matters." The move would be a first for the Trump administration. Former President Biden's administration launched an official AI dialogue with China in 2023. Tech policy experts told The Hill that while renewing talks is positive, they aren't holding their breath given the history of distrust between the two nations. Chris McGuire, who led U.S.-China AI policy at the National Security Council in the Biden administration, said China has so far shown an unwillingness to "negotiate in good faith." While the U.S. sent technical experts to China to discuss shared AI risks during the Biden administration, the Chinese government was more concerned about U.S. export controls on AI chips, said McGuire, who is now a senior fellow for China and emerging technologies at the Council for Foreign Relations. "It's important to lay the groundwork for that kind of dialogue in the future, because we are going to need to ask it," McGuire said, adding the Trump administration must ask, "What is the most effective way to get the Chinese to negotiate in good faith?" A White House official confirmed to The Hill that Trump is "The President is "planning to discuss AI during his visit to China" and asserted that the U.S. is "leading the world in the AI race." Mythos's arrival looms in background Trump heads to China amid a drastically different technology landscape than his last state visit in 2017. "The best AI model in 2017 was barely able to conceive grammatically correct sentences, if it could even do that," McGuire said. "Now, we're talking about AI fundamentally replacing large amounts of human work." As AI models rapidly advance, so do fears about their capabilities. Fedasiuk said the meeting "could not arrive at a less opportune time," following Anthropic's limited release of the Mythos cybersecurity model last month. The model, according to Anthropic, is moving the cyber risks of AI from the hypothetical to real life. The AI firm says Mythos can spot decades-old vulnerabilities, giving hackers the ability to easily target U.S. banks, government or other software in breaches. Mythos' release rattled the Trump administration, which typically prioritized the U.S.'s competitive standing over AI safety risks, though it doesn't appear there is a consensus yet on how to address concerns. A second senior U.S. official seemingly pointed to these fears, telling reporters AI is a "rapidly evolving sector" and the administration "has security concerns." "I would not be surprised if the leaders touched on some of those concerns," the official said of this week's China talks. Experts are not expecting any binding agreement over these concerns, especially given China's dismissal of AI safety concerns in the past. But neither leader, Fedasiuk said, wants to see AI misused by cyber criminals or bioterrorists against their countries, adding there is "value in at least having a conversation between the governments even if expectations are relatively low." Chip exports impossible to ignore While safety could play a more pronounced role in this week's talks, the ongoing competition with China over AI development is still prevalent. Just weeks ago, Michael Kratsios, the director of the White House's Office of Science and Technology, accused China of running an "industrial-scale campaign" to distill frontier AI models from U.S. companies. "These coordinated campaigns systematically extract capabilities from American AI models, exploiting American expertise and innovation," Kratsios wrote at the time. To curb competition, the U.S. has various export controls on American-made chips to China, a topic likely to come up this week. Trump will bring more than a dozen technology and business leaders with him to Beijing, including Tesla CEO and AI developer Elon Musk; Apple's outgoing CEO Tim Cook; and Sanjay Mehrotra, the CEO of Micron Technology, which is one of the largest semiconductor firms in the U.S. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink and Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, who have both been in Trump's ear about the need to grow the U.S.'s AI infrastructure, are also among those invited. "These people want a level playing field, they're here to echo what President Trump is talking about, and we welcome that, and I think the Chinese do as well," U.S. Ambassador to China David Perdue told Fox News on Tuesday. Notably left off the guest list is Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who has pushed back on U.S. export controls on chips, arguing they helped China accelerate the development of its own technology. Nvidia did not provide comment on Huang's absence. After initially restricting the sales of Nvidia's H20 chips to China last year, Trump reversed course last summer, allowing the firm to sell the chips, which were developed with U.S. exports in mind, to China for a 15 percent cut. Trump also cleared the way late last year for Nvidia to sell its more powerful H200 chips to China for a 25 percent cut of revenue. At the time of the last state visit to China in 2017, Washington had virtually no limitations on technology exports to China. The chip export restrictions to China came in the latter half of Trump's first term, with restrictions imposed on Chinese-based firms Huawei and ZTE. The Biden administration significantly ramped up these export controls in an attempt to slow down Beijing's AI development. The Trump administration rescinded a sweeping Biden-era AI diffusion rule, which would've placed caps on chip sales to most countries, but also agreed to ease chip export rules to allow the sale of certain Nvidia chips to China, drawing concerns from China hawks on both sides of the aisle. At the same time, the Trump administration has reportedly floated further restricting some AI chip shipments, which experts suggested the president could use as leverage in broader negotiations. "The fact is the competitive nature of the U.S.-China relationship is only ramping up," McGuire said. "Trump is trying to generally play down the intensity of U.S.-China competition, but there aren't any moves that the administration is considering to actually try to change that structural reality."

White House scrambles to tame AI fears

The White House is scrambling to find its footing on AI policy, as the development of new, more powerful models forces the Trump administration to rethink its strategy on AI safety. From the outset of President Trump's second term, the White House has promoted a pro-innovation, light-touch stance on AI regulations, prioritizing the U.S.'s competitive standing against other countries. AI battles in the White House and Congress have focused largely on efforts to preempt state AI laws deemed overly restrictive as a result. But the release of Anthropic's Mythos, the company's newest model capable of spotting decades-old security vulnerabilities, has shaken the administration's commitment to its typical hands-off approach, prompting discussions about heavier government involvement in new model rollouts. Conflicting messages from administration officials and reports this week of a potential executive order on AI vetting has sparked panic from the tech industry and backlash from critics of strict AI regulation. "The flip-flopping nature of the administration's tech respond signal that there is no clear direction or leader driving the agenda," a former Trump White House official told The Hill Friday. "The whiplash distracts from the work we are doing to address the risks on AI today." The back-and-forth began earlier this week, when The New York Times reported the White House is considering vetting AI models before they are released. Politico reported a day later the White House floated an order creating a "vetting regime" that would require AI companies to be approved by the government before releasing models. National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett hinted at something similar Wednesday. "We're studying possibly an executive order to give a clear roadmap to everybody about how this is going to go and how future AIs that also potentially create vulnerabilities should go through a process so that, you know, they're released in the wild after they've been proven safe, just like an FDA drug," Hassett said on Fox Business's "Mornings with Maria." The comment immediately sparked concerns from AI industry players, many of whom argued that a FDA-like approval process aligned more with the Biden administration's cautious approach to AI rather than Trump's deregulatory posture. "From day one, the Trump administration rejected the Biden-Harris approach to AI," Neil Chilson, head of AI policy at the Abundance Institute, and Adam Thierer, resident senior fellow with the technology and innovation team at the R Street Institute, wrote in a joint post Thursday. "That's why Hassett's comments have caused a stir," they continued. "Adopting an FDA-style regulatory regime for AI would represent a shocking policy reversal by the Trump administration, and a major about-face on how America has approached software, online speech, and digital commerce." Asked about these reports, a White House official said policy announcements will come directly from Trump and that "discussion about potential executive orders is speculation." "There is no shifting messaging -The White House continues to balance advancing innovation and ensuring security in our AI policymaking," the official added in a statement. Some in the tech policy space warned such pre-approval systems could give federal officials a "kill switch" to quash speech and stifle innovation. "Requiring pre-launch approval was criticized as heavy-handed and anticompetitive when included in the Biden administration's executive order on AI," Jennifer Huddleston and Juan Londoño with the libertarian think tank Cato Institute, said Thursday. Hours after Hassett's comment, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles appeared to try to quell some of these fears, writing on X that the administration is "not in the business of picking winners and losers." "This administration has one goal; ensure the best and safest tech is deployed rapidly to defeat any and all threats," Wiles wrote. "We appreciate the effort being made by the frontier labs to ensure that goal is met." This is not the first time Trump has abruptly shifted his stance on major technology policy issue. During his first term, Trump criticized TikTok and pushed for banning the social media app in the U.S. But by the start of his second term he cut a deal to preserve the app. He made a similar switch on cryptocurrency, dismissing it as a "scam" in his first term before welcoming its political and financial benefits during the 2024 campaign. The White House's shift comes at a moment when Americans are increasingly worried about AI and its potential impacts on society. In a Quinnipiac poll released in late March, 80 percent of U.S. adults said they were concerned about the technology. While the prospect of a mandatory vetting process stoked alarm, AI firms have agreed, at least voluntarily, in the past to share their models with the government for evaluation ahead of a release. The Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), housed within the National Institute of Standards and Technology, has evaluated models from OpenAI and Anthropic since 2024. Amid this week's rumors, NIST announced three leading AI companies -- Google DeepMind, Microsoft and xAI -- agreed to also share their models for government testing ahead of release. While it's unclear where the Trump administration will ultimately land on a vetting process, AI safety has become a more prominent issue for the White House, seemingly in part due to Mythos. The AI model, which Anthropic did not release publicly, can help institutions spot and patch security vulnerabilities more quickly. But it may also be a double-edged sword, empowering hackers to find and potentially exploit these flaws. "What we had in the last month was a step change in the power of one large language model," Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox Business' "Sunday Morning Futures," adding he expects to see the same from other companies. Bessent echoed the administration's typical emphasis on the U.S. staying ahead, but added it was not mutually exclusive with safety. "Imagine if China or some non-state actor were ahead of us," Bessent continued. "So what we're determined to do is work with our AI companies to allow them to continue to innovate." "But our charge in the U.S. government is maintaining safety," he added. "And there is a very important calculus here between innovation and safety. And the US government, we're going to make sure that things stay safe." The Trump administration's shifting approach to AI comes as Bessent and other officials take the reins of the issue after David Sacks, Trump's AI and crypto czar, departed the White House earlier this year. Sacks, an early PayPal executive and prominent venture capitalist, largely favored a hands-off strategy for AI regulation. "It looks to me like that was not a...well-considered whole of government, really thoroughly endorsed position on how to do AI regulation, but just he was the person in the room who had a lot of thoughts, had strong views on AI and that sort of carried the day," Helen Toner, interim executive director at the Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology, said during the AI+Expo in Washington Thursday. In an April call, Vice President Vance told major AI leaders "we all need to work together" on the issue, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. In a sign of how seriously the administration is taking Mythos, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei met with White House officials in mid-April, less than two months after Trump directed federal civilian agencies to stop using the company's technology following a dispute between the AI firm and the Pentagon. The Defense Department labeled Anthropic a supply chain risk, a designation typically reserved for foreign adversaries. Even as the White House appears to extend an olive branch, the Pentagon has shown little interest in reconciliation.

How Anthropic's Mythos Triggered Trump's AI Regulation U-Turn - Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT)

A new AI model from privately held Anthropic is so powerful that the company won't release it publicly and the White House is reversing its hands-off approach to AI regulation, the Wall Street Journal reported. From Hands-Off To FDA For AI President Donald Trump is weighing an executive order to create a formal oversight process for the most advanced AI models, a reversal from his December 2025 order targeting state AI laws. National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett likened the expected regime to FDA drug approval on Fox Business this week. National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross is leading the response, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has warned banking executives directly about the model. Polymarket's "Trump orders federal review of AI model releases by May 31?" contract sits at 19%, suggesting traders aren't yet pricing in an imminent order. White House adviser David Sacks has publicly pushed back on the regulation push, arguing on his All-In podcast that the threat is overblown. Anthropic Pulls Away From OpenAI Polymarket traders give Anthropic a 63% probability of having the top AI model at the end of June, with $5m in volume on the contract. Anthropic is also a 68% favorite to IPO before OpenAI on a separate Polymarket market. The Equity Read Microsoft, OpenAI's largest backer and the most direct public exposure to any OpenAI slowdown, is trading at $415. Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN), with $8 billion in Anthropic, is trading at $272. The shift lands days before Trump's summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, where AI risk is on the agenda. Coordinated US-China restrictions could bake the regulation thesis in further. Image: Shutterstock Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs To add Benzinga News as your preferred source on Google, click here.

Trump to regulate AI development after Anthropic's Mythos posed cybersecurity threat - report

US President Donald Trump talks with Vice President JD Vance in the Cross Hall following a celebration of US military mothers event at the White House in Washington, US, May 8, 2025. The White House might stop freely promoting artificial intelligence technology, with reports from both The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post indicating that the US government might adopt a more cautious stance after witnessing the capabilities of Anthropic's Mythos, the latest generation of AI models. According to the Thursday WSJ report, US Vice President JD Vance was "alarmed" after a call with the heads of the biggest artificial intelligence companies, with the Mythos model among the most worrying because of its ability to find software vulnerabilities on its own. The main factor, according to the WSJ, is that these new models could target critical infrastructure administered by local authorities rather than the national government, with the local governments lacking the tools to disrupt such attacks when they occur. US National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said the Trump administration was working on a way to regulate how high-tech companies introduce new AI models to the market, with the main proposal being a system similar to the FDA's for testing new drugs. This would, according to Hassett, guarantee that "they're released to the wild after they've been proven safe," while an official working on the project told The Washington Post that the details of how it would work are "still being hashed out." From 'safety' being a problem to a necessity Nathan Calvin, general counsel and vice president of state affairs at Encode, a nonprofit AI advocacy group, told The Washington Post that officials started hearing the words "safety" and "AI" in the White House, something that was seen as taboo for the Trump administration up to now. "We just heard a bunch of top Cabinet officials saying the words 'safety' and 'AI' in the same sentence, which is not how the admin was talking about these issues even a few months ago," said Calvin. The White House addressed the topic, saying that it was "exploring the balance between advancing innovation and ensuring security" alongside the top AI developers in the US. Israel's use of AI In December 2023, the government of Israel introduced an "AI Policy on Artificial Intelligence Regulation and Ethics" that aims to apply "soft regulations" to the sector without impeding the development of these technologies. "These principles we have published facilitate development and responsible innovation, enabling the use of AI, while safeguarding basic rights and the public interest," said Ofir Akunis, the then-Innovation, Science and Technology Minister. In September 2024, the Innovation Ministry launched a national expert forum on AI, with experts from academia, industry, and leading civil society organizations to help develop a government strategy and policy to promote the safe use of artificial intelligence. At the military level, the IDF implemented during the recent wars a unit responsible for integrating and relaying artificial intelligence and "big data" intelligence, with its commander, Col. Rotem Beshi, telling The Jerusalem Post that it played a critical role in transforming the air force's effectiveness during the recent war with Iran. A new system managed by Matzpen, known as the LOCHEM system, handled all the planning for attacks on Iran, starting with working with the air force's special, relatively new Iran unit, said Beshi. Yonah Jeremy Bob contributed to this report.

Trump's White House considers implementing AI regulation after cybersecurity warnings

US President Donald Trump speaks prior to signing an executive order on AI, in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, DC, US December 11, 2025. Having given Silicon Valley free rein to roll out the technology, US President Donald Trump is now considering introducing government oversight amid growing fears of an AI-powered cyberattack, as White House officials told AI company executives about plans for a working group of tech and government officials to examine potential oversight procedures in meetings last week. White House officials said that the review process may be similar to the procedure being developed in Britain, which assigns several government bodies to ensure that AI models meet certain safety standards. The administration's previous position These discussions mark a sharp pivot in the president's attitude towards AI technology. Speaking at an AI event in July 2025, Trump said, "We're going to make this industry absolutely the top, because right now it's a beautiful baby that's born, we have to grow that baby and let that baby thrive. We can't stop it. We can't stop it with politics. We can't stop it with foolish rules and even stupid rules." Over his second term, Trump has found himself increasingly isolated in his stance on AI as concerns mount about the threats that the technology may pose to jobs, education, privacy, and mental health. Concerns about the increased use of AI in daily life have united Democrats and Republicans - a Pew Research Center poll in 2025 found that 50% of Republicans and 51% of Democrats are more concerned than excited about the technology's development and increasing popularity. What prompted the sudden change in attitude Last month, the technology start-up Anthropic announced a new AI model called Mythos. Mythos is incredibly powerful at identifying security vulnerabilities in software. Anthropic declined to release the model to the public, stating that doing so could lead to a cybersecurity "reckoning." The White House doesn't want to be held responsible for any political repercussions if a devastating AI-enabled cyberattack were to occur, according to administration reports. They are also analyzing whether the new models could have cyber-capabilities useful to the Pentagon or US intelligence agencies. White House leadership's position on regulation The changing policy on AI coincides with a leadership change within the White House. In March, David Sacks, the White House AI and crypto czar, stepped down from his role, leaving Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to fill in his position. These regulatory moves take the administration away from the stance that Vice President JD Vance outlined at the international AI gathering in Paris last year, where he warned that "excessive regulation of the AI sector could kill a transformative industry just as it's taking off." "The AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety," he added, "It will be won by building." It is not yet known to what extent the industry will be regulated by the Trump administration's new plan.

After India, Is the Trump Regime Taking a Relook at Its Hands-off Approach Towards AI?

India could take a leaf off President Trump's purported move to set up an oversight process for all new AI models Ever since artificial intelligence (AI) appeared in its current avatar, there has been a vertical division on building guardrails around it, with little or no consensus between the warring opinions. However, in the wake of the recent Claude Mythos circus orchestrated by Anthropic, policymakers are discussing a hands-on policy approach to this fast-growing ecosystem India recently announced that they are actively considering a prescriptive approach towards future AI regulations and now the world's biggest free market protagonist Donald Trump seems to be having second thoughts on allowing a free rein to this technology. A report in The New York Times said the White House was studying a proposal of actively vetting AI models before their release. A day after this report, the US Department of Commerce announced new agreements with Google DeepMind, Microsoft and xAI to conduct pre-deployment evaluations and targeted research to better assess frontier AI capabilities and advance the state of AI security. These agreements are based on tie-ups announced earlier and renegotiated following the concerns around Claude Mythos. "Independent, rigorous measurement science is essential to understanding frontier AI and its national security implications," says Chris Fall, Director of the Centre for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), housed within the Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards. "These expanded industry collaborations help us scale our work in the public interest at a critical moment," he says. Per a Department of Commerce statement Secretary Howard Lutnick would oversee the functioning of CAISI as the industry's primary point of contact within the US government to facilitate testing, collaborative research and best practice development related to commercial AI systems. CAISI's agreements with frontier AI developers enable government evaluation of AI models before they are publicly available, as well as post-deployment assessment and other research. To date, they have completed over 40 evaluations, including on state-of-the-art models that remain unreleased, says the official statement. The report in the NYT also suggests that the Trump administration is debating an executive order to create an AI working group that would bring together tech executives and government officials to examine potential oversight procedures. India already has a 10-member inter-ministerial AI governance and economic group (AIGEG) and a six-member tech experts panel doing this job. For the most part of his administration, Trump had given Silicon Valley a free rein around AI which eventually resulted in states passing their own legislation and creating a direct face-off with the White House. However, in recent times, the growing number of lawsuits over improper functioning of AI and its resultant tragic impact on human lives seems to have prompted the change of heart. Or, it could also simply be Trump's ego battle with Anthropic's Dario Amodei whom he had ejected from all government business following the latter's refusal to permit The Pentagon to use their AI models for largescale domestic surveillance and in autonomous weapons of war. Out went Anthropic and in came arch rival OpenAI which claimed it swung a better deal and was richer by $200 million. A few months later. when Anthropic aborted the release of its Claude Mythos model due to cybersecurity considerations last month, it was felt that the company had smoked the peace pipe within the White House. Top officials took the offer from Anthropic to run the Mythos model within their systems and check for cybersecurity flaws. Now, the administration seems to be taking a more rigid stance and some believe that have already discussed their plans with executives of Anthropic, Google and OpenAI. Of course, there is still no clarity around how the working group proposes to handle the oversight process itself. The NYT report claimed it could mirror the one being developed in Britain were government bodies are assigned to ensure that the AI models meet pre-defined safety standards. It is quite obvious that the move is a reversal of what the Trump administration stood for when it came to conversations about regulations muzzling the growth of AI. In fact, Trump wanted an AI edge over China and even rolled back Biden era regulations that required AI developers to run safety evaluations and report potential military uses. Back in July last year, Trump had exclaimed that the beautiful baby (AI) has been born and "we have to grow that baby and let that baby thrive. We can't stop it... not with politics. We can't stop it with foolish rules and even stupid rules," he had thundered during an AI event back then. However, it looks like it's again TACO Tuesday time and Trump Has Chickened Out. Of course, in this instant many experts are happy that the non-interventionist nonsense has been put to bed. Quite clearly Trump's White House does not want any blame for any possible AI-enabled cyberattack on the United States. At the same time, he also wants to lay his hands on any technology that enhances the cyber-capabilities of the US Intelligence agencies. So, there's a line of thought that in order for Washington to be able to use models like Mythos, they must have a review system in place that gives first access to the administration to all future AI models. However, the caveat would be that the government would never block their release. Heard of wine tasting? Well, this is a form of AI tasting!! Whatever be the case, it looks like those that sought to keep all AI development free are either having a change of heart or have since been replaced by those that believe in building guardrails in parallel to the AI development and not after. Now all that the Trump regime needs is a clear idea on who or which national agency holds point in this exercise. And this is precisely where the Narendra Modi government has an edge. For they have already created the AIGEG. Now, all that the policymakers, the experts and the bureaucrats have to do is frame up the guidelines, get parliamentary approval and get cracking. It is time, India paces up its Atmanirbhar tune and expands the chorus of sovereign AI.

China's AI is truly artifical - and the US must fight Xi's zero-sum tech race and stolen advancements

Despite the hype surrounding China's artificial intelligence capabilities, progress remains heavily dependent on theft and smuggling. The Chinese Communist Party, meanwhile, is determined to maintain tight control. That has become increasingly clear ahead of this week's Beijing summit between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. The Chinese leader wants to lead the world in what he terms an "epoch-defining technology." He appears confident that Trump, preoccupied by his war against Iran, has limited options to counter Beijing's increasingly brazen activities. Last month, the White House accused Beijing of "industrial-scale" theft of know-how from American AI labs. Meanwhile, US prosecutors claim to have busted an international smuggling ring that funneled advanced chips worth billions of dollars to China in defiance of sanctions. The CCP is also stepping up efforts to protect China's own AI innovation, blocking a $2 billion takeover by Meta of a Chinese AI start-up called Manus. For good measure, the authorities prevented Manus' two founders from leaving the country. The accusations of theft refer to a process called "distillation," whereby China is accused of illicitly training its smaller AI models on the output of larger (and expensively developed) US models. A leaked internal memo written by Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said: "The US government has information indicating that foreign entities, principally based in China, are engaged in deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns to distill US frontier AI systems." Distillation involves the creation of thousands of fake accounts for the targeted AI chatbot or tool, with the accounts working together to extract information. The US AI company Anthropic said it had detected 24,000 fraudulent accounts, which had generated more than 16 million exchanges with its powerful Claude chatbot. It accused leading Chinese labs of being behind the campaign in order to acquire powerful capabilities "in a fraction of the time, and at a fraction of the cost." The company also warned that "distilled" apps would carry none of the safeguards of the original against using AI for such activities as developing bioweapons or carrying out destructive cyberattacks and thereby "creating significant national security risks." Beijing also appears to have established an extensive and lavishly funded smuggling network to get around US restrictions on the sale of the top-end Nvidia chips used for training AI models. In a series of indictments against Chinese nationals, federal prosecutors describe how servers containing "billions of dollars" of restricted chips were shipped to front companies in Southeast Asia before being repackaged and diverted to Hong Kong and mainland China. One surveillance video showed a defendant using a hair dryer to swap around sticky labels and serial number tags. It was a bizarrely low-tech image compared to the high-tech and high-stakes smuggling he was engaged in -- facilitating what Xi has characterized as "a race to the top." The indictments were characterized as the tip of a chip-smuggling iceberg, with the struggle for AI supremacy seen as not just a question of economic competition but a battle that will define the future balance of global power. Xi is not only determined that China will win that race but also that AI will remain firmly under the control of the CCP -- as Mark Zuckerberg has now found out to his cost. The Meta boss thought his takeover of Manus was a done deal, and Manus employees had already moved into Meta's Singapore office. The Chinese start-up is an AI agent, which means that rather than creating a chatbot to answer questions, it carries out AI-enabled tasks for users -- acting as a sort of autonomous personal assistant for functions ranging from product launches to stock market analyses and travel plans. The Chinese authorities did not say which laws or regulations the deal violates, but it seems designed as a warning to upstart Chinese AI start-ups companies against taking their technology outside China. "Beijing effectively drew a bright red line that Chinese AI talent and technology are not for sale to American companies, full stop," Han Shen Lin, Shanghai-based China country director at US consultancy firm the Asia Group, told Reuters. In torpedoing the deal, the CCP effectively killed the practice of "Singapore washing." Manus was one of a string of Chinese tech companies (which include Shein and TikTok) to shift their headquarters to the city state in an effort, in part, to appear less Chinese. All Chinese companies are required by law to assist Beijing's intelligence and security agencies and have sought to convince clients and investors that by basing themselves in Singapore they are no longer beholden to the CCP. This was always fanciful, but the party has demonstrated that no company of Chinese origin can escape its roots and obligations. Last week, a hearing organized by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which monitors and reports to Congress on national security issues, was warned that China was harvesting US data in order to build "AI-enabled intelligence and targeting architecture for economic competition, political coercion and wartime advantage." Yet while there is strong bipartisan support in Congress for aggressive export controls on technology, Trump is sounding far more dovish. At this week's summit, delayed from March because of the Iran war, Xi will be calculating that Trump has limited options and little appetite for a return to trade hostilities that could result in further global economic disruption. Last year, Trump scaled back tariffs and abandoned other restrictions on Chinese companies after Beijing weaponized rare earths. They threatened to restrict access to these critical minerals, which are crucial to global high-tech industries, and over which China has a near monopoly. Even as evidence of AI-related theft and smuggling has grown, Trump has sent mixed messages. He eased controls on some Nvidia chips, and in spite of security concerns over Chinese electric vehicles, he has suggested he is open to Chinese car makers building vehicles in the US. In addition, his harsh words for long-established allies are in stark contrast with his more friendly approach to Xi. He has played down reports that Beijing might be providing material support to Iran, writing on Truth Social: "They have agreed not to send weapons to Iran. President Xi will give me a big, fat, hug when I get there . . . We are working together smartly, and very well! Doesn't that beat fighting." By the end of last year, around a third of AI models downloaded worldwide were Chinese. Xi is also riding a wave of what has been dubbed "Chinamaxxing." At its heart is an online infatuation with Chinese technology, much of it driven by Western influencers, who have been courted by the CCP. The themes of China's innovation prowess and a supposed greater societal acceptance of AI are also widely peddled by more credulous Western analysts. The reality is more nuanced -- and not only because of Beijing's continued reliance on large-scale theft. Take DeepSeek, the Chinese company that startled the world last year with AI models that performed almost as well as the best Western ones, but at a fraction of the cost. Last week, its latest release was met with a collective shrug. Not only was this one more expensive to build, but was reportedly subject to far more CCP meddling. It was delayed by CCP pressure for it to be trained on Chinese chips, but fell back on Nvidia's when those made by Huawei proved inadequate. Humanoid robots are another much-hyped tech -- performing kung fu at a Chinese New Year celebration, and competing in the recent Beijing marathon. They certainly had entertainment value, but experts are skeptical about their real-world applications. They are also the result of an extravagantly wasteful state-led program -- something of a metaphor for Chinese innovation more broadly. Security and control are overwhelming priorities for Xi. While he has unleashed his spies to harvest know-how and chips, Chinese-developed algorithms must sing to the party's tune. The CCP has also begun to fret about safety, cybersecurity and the possible negative impact on jobs. The recent and sudden freezing of 200 robotaxis, gumming up the streets of Wuhan, provided one wake-up call. Meanwhile, a recent report from a state think tank suggesting that Chinese workers are becoming increasingly worried about the impact on their jobs provided another. "We must act early and decisively: anticipating and preventing problems with prudence and caution," according to Xi. Young people are already struggling to find jobs -- with youth unemployment hovering around 17%, according to official figures. The CCP frets about an epidemic of tangping ("lying flat"), whereby young people drop out of a high pressure and unrewarding jobs market to opt for a simpler life. Last month, China's main spy agency, the Ministry of State Security, declared that tangping was a foreign conspiracy designed to undermine Chinese youth and society. While the AI race might be hotting up, the CCP's basic instincts remain chillingly familiar.