DANGER!! The MAGAzied U.S. government will decide who gets to use the latest American AI technology
S. E. Anderson
The U.S. government will decide who gets to use the latest American AI technology
The trump administration is requiring both Anthropic and OpenAI to get approval for each new customer of their most powerful AI technology.
OpenAI made clear it is concerned about increased government oversight.
SAN FRANCISCO — The trump administration is expanding its recent policy of vetting companies that want access to the latest artificial intelligence technology, expanding its regulation of Silicon Valley.
ChatGPT-maker OpenAI said Friday that the U.S. government would initially approve who gets access to its latest new release while AI companies and the administration work out a longer-term plan for regulation on the sector.
Hours later, the Commerce Department sent a letter to rival AI developer Anthropic, telling the company it would be allowed to provide its own latest AI model, Mythos 5, only to a restricted list of U.S.-based companies, according to a copy of the letter reviewed by The Washington Post.
The trump administration’s moves to vet the customers of leading American tech companies underline a rapid evolution in U.S. AI policy. President Donald trump returned to office promising a hands-off approach to the industry and decried attempts by the Biden administration to create safety standards for new AI models. But after the recent appearance of systems capable of finding security vulnerabilities in software spooked officials in Washington and around the world, the White House changed its position.
“In a matter of weeks, U.S. federal AI policy has gone from implausibly libertarian to increasingly draconian and opaque,” Dean Ball, a former trump AI adviser, wrote in a social media post Friday. Ball announced last week he will join OpenAI next month to work on policy.
OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman made clear that he did not welcome the additional federal oversight on his company. “I just don't like the idea of the government picking the customers,” he wrote Friday in a post on X. “Confident we will get to a better place.”
The letter to Anthropic comes two weeks after the trump administration barred the company from providing access to its Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models to any non-U.S. citizen, including its own employees, leading the company to withdraw them from use.
Anthropic has negotiated with the government every day since but has not been able to secure an end to the export ban, according to a person familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share nonpublic information.
“I have determined that appropriate safeguards are in place to permit certain trusted partners to access the Claude Mythos 5 Model,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick wrote in the letter to Anthropic. Non-U.S. citizens of approved companies can also use the technology, and the government has the right to change the list of companies at any time, the letter said.
The letter reviewed by The Post did not specify which companies are on the list of trusted partners. A person familiar with the matter said that it included around 100 companies but spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private information.
Anthropic said in a statement that it had received notice from the government that it could redeploy Mythos 5 to a “small group of cyber defenders and infrastructure providers.” The company is working to restore access to those companies, the statement said.
Industry leaders and politicians on Friday questioned the administration’s moves.
“American AI innovation running into trump’s patronage-and-tribute Admin is no bueno,” Adam Kovacevich, chief executive of Chamber of Progress, a lobbying group that represents tech companies including Apple, Google and OpenAI, said Friday in a post on X responding to the limits on OpenAI.
“The most kleptocratic regime in U.S. history has positioned itself as the unreviewable gatekeeper of the world’s most powerful technology, and nobody inside or outside the administration can say what standards it’s using to decide which trillion-dollar companies it’s allowing through the gate,” Rep. Sam Liccardo (D-California) told The Post.
An OpenAI blog post on the company’s arrangement with the government said: “We don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default. It keeps the best tools from users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders, and global partners who need them.”
“We are taking this short-term step because we believe it is the strongest path to broader availability in the coming weeks,” the blog post said.
OpenAI said that Sol was its most powerful AI model yet and showed improvements in coding and cybersecurity tasks. Only companies approved by the government will get access. There is no process for individual users to get access to the new model. (The Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)
The administration signed off on a list of companies OpenAI asked to be allowed access to Sol but excluded a handful of entities located outside of the United States, a White House official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to share nonpublic information. Another White House official said the government was working with AI labs to develop a long-term approach for addressing the challenges of getting the technology out to more users.
trump’s reelection last year received vocal backing from tech executives and investors who had complained President Joe Biden was too restrictive of AI development. Big Tech CEOs attended trump’s inauguration, and venture investor David Sacks, a staunch opponent of government limits on tech companies, was made White House AI and crypto czar.
The administration’s approach shifted after Anthropic announced an AI model called Mythos in April and warned that its ability to identify security holes in software could be dangerous in the wrong hands. The government worked with the company to approve which companies and nations could access the technology.
Relations between the trump administration and Anthropic, already strained from the company’s request earlier this year for limits on military use of its technology, blew up earlier this month when the Commerce Department placed export controls on Mythos and another version of the technology called Fable.
The trump administration’s intervention with OpenAI disclosed Friday was the first time it had extended government vetting of AI customers beyond Anthropic. OpenAI has been providing its own cybersecurity-focused model to companies without government oversight for over a month.
Umesh Sachdev, CEO of AI software company Uniphore, said although the new rules were disruptive they could be reformed to win industry support. “This is the brute-force approach,” he said. “My hope is this will all settle into a repeatable, predictable, well-understood process.”
The shift in the administration’s stance to AI companies has sparked fear in other countries that their citizens, companies and government agencies could be cut off from top technology. Anthropic provided some non-U.S. companies and governments with access to Mythos 5 before the government’s export ban led it to withdraw the model. The Commerce Department letter to Anthropic on Friday said that only U.S.-based companies have access.
British Member of Parliament Kanishka Narayan said Friday in a post on X that Britain’s AI Security Institute had access to OpenAI’s new GPT-5.6 model. It is the only non-U.S. entity with access to it, said a person familiar with the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe a private arrangement.
At the Group of Seven summit in France this month, the leaders of France and Canada expressed concern about becoming over-reliant on U.S. AI companies that the White House could place off-limits to non-Americans.
Soon after, Canadian companies Cohere, an AI provider, and Bell, a telecoms giant, announced a partnership to build “sovereign” AI run out of data centers in the country. ///
s. e. anderson
author of The Black Holocaust for Beginners
"If WORK was good for you, the rich would leave none for the poor." (Haiti)
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