US Government Takes Control Over AI Model Releases as Anthropic and OpenAI Face Regulatory Limbo

It's not about Anthropic vs. OpenAI anymore

The U.S. government is set to take an awful lot of control over which AI models get released. Two weeks after the U.S. government pulled Anthropic's Fable and Mythos models, OpenAI's new model seems to be headed for the same limbo. The Information broke the news Thursday that GPT 5.6 would be released only into limited preview, with the government approving the release "customer by customer" until a general release can be approved. If that preview only lasts a "couple of weeks," as Altman reportedly projected, that might not be a particularly big problem. But Mythos has already been in preview for months, and there's no indication it will make it to general release any time soon. Even a few weeks spent in review could significantly limit the economic upside of a costly new system, at a time when AI labs are trying desperately to improve their bottom lines. If the pace of model development slows as a result, it's likely to put a similar chill on the ongoing data center buildout. If this goes bad, the entire industry could be at risk. Critically, OpenAI and Anthropic are now in the same exact position with the same problems facing them and the same disaster waiting if they fail. Conversations within the tech industry tend to focus on the role of one side or another in bringing this on, either accusing Anthropic of running a regulatory capture scheme or accusing OpenAI of cozying up to Trump to ice out a rival. It's understandable; many of the most prominent people in the industry have billions of dollars riding on one company or the other. But what's happening now is bigger than that. The cost of implementing a haphazard government approval process for every frontier model is obvious, and there's no fix that helps one lab without helping the others. The most immediate problem is simply establishing a release process that makes sense. It's fine for the government to test models before release (this is how it works for lots of consumer products) -- but as GMU fellow (and soon-to-be OpenAI employee) Dean Ball detailed in an eloquent post this morning, it's not clear what kind of safety assurances could be put in place to satisfy regulators. The U.S. government doesn't have the expertise or capacity for the kind of testing that would be needed here. It's not even clear what regulators would be trying to protect against, since there's been no effort to articulate what risks the government is actually concerned about. It's tempting to see the government process as the whole of the problem itself, but there are real concerns underneath. Even if you don't believe the Mythos hype, there's clear evidence of how AI tools are revolutionizing cybersecurity. There are similar processes at work in biorisk and alignment. Restricting model releases can't be the whole answer in itself -- that will only limit what's available to the public -- but there are real concerns to be addressed. The best ideas for addressing them, as laid out by Ball, will mean working together. It will mean trusting independent groups to guide the process, even if they don't completely align with your goals. It will mean lining up behind the least-bad regulatory options available, instead of fighting every regulation tooth-and-nail. And most of all, it will mean fighting for AI as an industry, instead of seeing safety and regulation as opportunities to gain an advantage. For a lot of people working in AI, that will be a tough sell. Unfortunately, AI models have progressed to the point where their capabilities have real political consequences. Dealing with those consequences will require collective action. In the weeks to come, we'll find out if that's something the industry is capable of.

Anthropic's Mythos mess is only getting worse

It's been two weeks since Anthropic took its Mythos-class models offline after a Friday evening ultimatum from the Trump administration. The company sprang into action immediately, sending a barrage of executives to Washington, DC. But updates have been suspiciously lacking, with no resolution in sight. Anthropic declined to comment multiple times this week about the state of the talks, saying there was no news to share. But the lack of news is the story here. After 14 days of high-intensity negotiations, nobody knows when or if Anthropic's most powerful AI models will come back, let alone whether President Trump could expand his order to more companies with similar tech. And the more days pass without any resolution, the more dire things become -- not just for Anthropic, but for the entire US AI industry. The Trump administration's June 12th export control order demanded that Anthropic suspend access by "any foreign national" to Mythos 5 and Fable 5 due to security concerns. This ban covered any non-US citizen inside or outside the US, including ones employed by Anthropic. So far, Anthropic has concluded that its only option is to keep these models offline. It's not clear exactly why Anthropic and the administration remain at an impasse. One problem may be that there's no clear framework for applying export controls to AI systems. Most companies making dual-use products -- civilian systems with potential defense or military uses -- can evaluate them using what's essentially a checklist during the manufacturing and production process. Anthropic, however, is facing a complicated bureaucracy figuring out how to apply its rules from first principles. This particular export control process can normally unfold over months, if not years, and conclude before a product reaches market. But as The Verge previously reported, the US Department of Commerce apparently tested Fable 5 before release and raised no complaints. A source familiar with negotiations said Anthropic concluded its models were safe to release. The agency apparently didn't act until someone (reportedly Amazon CEO Andy Jassy) flagged a method for seemingly breaking Fable 5's guardrails -- at which point the whole process was crunched into a few days. Katie Moussouris, the founder and CEO of Luta Security, viewed a report about the Fable 5 vulnerability at Anthropic's request. She thinks it's significantly overblown. In a blog post, Moussouris detailed how researchers jailbroke guardrails that prevent Fable 5 from finding exploitable security holes, one of the unfettered Mythos 5's scariest capabilities. The model would refuse requests to review code "for security issues," but it would accept demands to "fix this code" followed by manual prompts, which could theoretically lead to it flagging vulnerabilities it wasn't supposed to divulge. In Moussouris' eyes, however, this shouldn't have triggered such a severe governmental action and is in fact an essential tool for AI coding. "Defenders need to be able to ask AI to fix the bugs in a file, explain why the fix matters, and write tests that confirm the patch works," she wrote. "That is not a guardrail bypass. It is the most valuable thing an AI model can do for defensive security: executing the find, fix, and test loop defenders run every day." In the past week, Anthropic cofounder Tom Brown has replaced CEO Dario Amodei in negotiations with the Trump administration, alongside Sarah Heck, the company's public policy chief, Wired reported. But still, negotiations seem to be slow-moving, if there's any progress being made at all. Whatever the reasons for the delay, it's been a serious hit to Anthropic. Before the protracted negotiations, Anthropic was seen as the rare AI company with a path to profitability. Its Mythos-class models, whose input tokens sell for double the cost of its lower-powered Opus 4.8, were supposed to boost its revenue ahead of an upcoming IPO. Mythos' cybersecurity prowess even appeared to be thawing relations with the Trump administration after months of legal and rhetorical combat. Anthropic needs the revenue from Mythos to pay for all the compute it's secured recently, including a deal to pay SpaceX $15 billion per year for access to its data centers, as well as its public image before the IPO. Two of Anthropic's largest current shareholders -- Google and Amazon -- have tried to carefully stay on Trump's good side, so they're likely not happy either. Meanwhile, the glacial negotiations have also created a power vacuum in the global AI market, not only because of the Mythos shutdown, but because the US government has signaled a willingness to lock down American AI systems it deems risky -- and several US companies, including OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft, have models that may pose similar risks to Mythos. Countries have started calling for non-American AI. As Alex Stamos, cybersecurity expert and chief product officer at Corridor, told The Verge last week, "One of America's champions is being kneecapped by the US government while we're in a race with the Chinese. It's just incredibly stupid." As the days wear on, the situation only worsens for these companies. Their models inch closer to Mythos-level capabilities that could trigger an export control order -- in fact, OpenAI's GPT-5.5 Cyber just beat Mythos 5 on certain benchmarks, and the Trump administration reportedly just asked OpenAI to delay the release of GPT-5.6 over security concerns, with plans for the government to approve each customer one by one. Anthropic and OpenAI's IPOs are both approaching. And every day, China is pulling further ahead in the AI race. Ironically, the administration's order comes after months of pushing to dismantle AI safeguards and regulation -- it's one of the first sweeping regulatory decisions President Trump has made. But a whole host of cybersecurity leaders have come together to say that if regulation has to happen, this isn't the way to do it. For all the Trump administration's vows to roll back Biden-era AI regulation, it seems like, in many ways, it's gained that ground back -- and then some.