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- America has started licensing frontier AI releases, but the Trump administration’s approach — export controls on Anthropic’s Fable and limits on OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol — has been chaotic, improvised and nationalistic.
- A permanent block is unworkable and undesirable: China’s open-weight models like Z.ai’s GLM 5.2 are only months behind, and American firms rely on cheap, malleable Chinese models.
- Instead of politicians horse-trading with labs, the emerging norm of evaluation plus staggered release to trusted institutions should be formalised and run by technical, industry-led oversight.
Disasters often give birth to new rules. America’s Federal Reserve was created after the Panic of 1907, when stock prices collapsed by half. Muckrakers like Upton Sinclair pressured the government into establishing the Food and Drug Administration. The Securities and Exchange Commission emerged from the Great Depression. Artificial intelligence has not yet triggered a calamity, but the potential is there: models such as Anthropic’s Mythos and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol are exceptionally skilled hackers and could one day serve as capable advisers to bioterrorists.
Illustration: Ben Hickey
Understandably, the Trump administration is trying to regulate the technology before catastrophe strikes. It is collaborating with AI companies on voluntary standards that could soon be published. Unfortunately, its efforts so far have been a mess.
A chaotic, nationalistic start to licensing
Fable, Mythos and Sol in the crossfire
Anthropic was its first victim, hit with export controls in mid-June after the release of Fable, a guardrailed version of Mythos. That came shortly after a dispute between the company and the Pentagon. Fears of a grudge were eased when the administration appeared to force OpenAI to restrict access to its Sol model. Then, on June 30th, the Commerce Department abruptly lifted the ban on Fable after Anthropic adjusted its safety protections.
Throughout, the government has seemed to invent rules on the fly. Its decisions have also carried an unpleasant nationalistic tinge. At first it restricted Fable only for non-Americans; Anthropic concluded that a wholesale block was the only way to comply. It looks as if the administration pulled the only lever available, knowing that it was a de facto ban. But throughout the past month’s brouhaha, the government has made clear that Americans’ AI access takes precedence over foreigners’.
Why a permanent block will not work
Now that America has started licensing AI releases, it is unlikely to stop. But regulating frontier AI is tricky.
China is only months behind
China’s top models are only months behind America’s, and most are open-weight, meaning anyone can run or tinker with them. One recent release, GLM 5.2 from Z.ai, already matches the best of the last generation of American models. Chinese labs may take longer to catch up with Mythos, since they have fewer chips and American labs are cracking down on distillation, when competitors use the outputs of the best models to train their own. But that buys months, or a year at most.
America could ban Chinese open-weight models and punish foreigners who use them. But even if it managed to enforce its ban, a vast home market would keep China’s model-makers going.
Open-weight — a model whose weights are published so anyone can download, run and modify it. Distillation — training a new model on the outputs of a more capable model to replicate its abilities.
A growing gap would create its own dangers
So a permanent block is unworkable. It is also undesirable. Many American AI firms and researchers rely on Chinese models, which are cheap and malleable. The intelligence that makes new models dangerous also makes them tremendously useful.
Worries about China aside, a gulf between publicly available and restricted models is a problem. Societies adapt to AI best when improvements arrive gradually, not in a great lurch. Imagine the mess if regulators bottled up several generations of Mythos-style advances. The few with access would acquire great power. The sudden jump in capability whenever the models did get released would unleash chaos.
The better model: a staggered, expert-led release
How then can models like Mythos and Sol be safely set free? The emerging norm provides for an evaluation period and a staggered release to trusted institutions. That is a good start, but it needs formalising.
Some choices, such as how much risk to tolerate, belong to elected leaders. But politicians should not be micromanaging the process or horse-trading with AI companies, as they do today.
Once those goals are set, politicians should stand back. Evaluating a model is a technical problem. Governments have some expertise, for example in America’s Centre for AI Standards and Innovation or Britain’s AI Security Institute (AISI). But the private sector has more. The finance and electric-power industries offer structures where oversight is carried out by industry bodies, overseen by government. Something similar might help amalgamate knowledge from the AI labs, research groups and foreign bodies such as AISI.
Allies cannot rely on Washington alone
Ideally, America would work with its allies on AI regulation. Alas, it is hard to imagine Donald Trump giving up the immense sovereign power that stems from control of frontier models. Locking others out of AI is not in America’s economic or strategic interest, but neither were indiscriminate tariffs or threats to Greenland.
So other countries must build leverage with their own AI sectors and regulations, and find fail-safes for American export controls. They could, for instance, ensure that businesses can easily switch to non-American models that run on non-American data centres. It is far wiser to depend on America than on China, but they would be mad to ignore the risks.
Fable is free — but without formal, expert-led rules for frontier AI, the next licensing fight will be just as chaotic.
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