The Ad Hoc AI Licensing Regime

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:00)
Today on the AI Weekly Brief, meet your ad hoc AI licensing regime. AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
All right, friends, we are back with another 5-minute AI Weekly Brief. Use this episode to catch up on what you missed or to forward along to someone who needs to know what's going on but isn't quite at the daily episode stage yet.
Quick note before we get into the show. After recording and editing this episode, we got some big news updates on Friday afternoon and evening. What you're about to hear is the episode that happened before that news came out, and stick around at the end for a few thoughts on the latest on Mythos and GPT 5.6.
This was a week where the hallmark was there was at no point any one huge story in AI, but instead every single part of AI, from politics to markets to models, had something happen that inched us along towards a future that in many cases, not everyone is loving. Certainly the big background noise continues to be the Fable 5 story. Last weekend, people started chattering about a quote from Senator Mark Warner, who reported that the NSA had told him that Mythos had been able to break into their classified systems. Now, many people took this as Mythos literally breaking into NSA's classified systems when of course, what it actually was, was that during a red-teaming exercise, in other words, a controlled experiment to figure out just how dangerous Mythos could be, the NSA saw much more significant capabilities than they had seen before. And this really set the tone for the week when it came to Fable and Mythos, in that everyone wanted to latch on to any small rumor or comment as an indicator of when we were actually going to get this thing back. One big whipsaw throughout the week was in the prediction markets, which started very bleary, but then had a single day where the likelihood of Fable 5 returning by July 1st jumped all the way up above 60%.
Now it appears that the source for that were reports that the White House was having a better time interacting with Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown after CEO Dario Amadei had been sidelined in the conversations. And yet the week closed on the most important and most substantive news in all of this, which is that yes indeed, this is not just a personality clash between the White House and Anthropic, but a new ad hoc, informal, unaccountable, and seemingly not particularly technically competent licensing regime. The newest news is that GPT 5.6 is indeed being delayed by the Trump administration as well. In a Wednesday company Q&A, Sam Altman told OpenAI that GPT 5.6 would not be coming to the public but would instead be released in a limited preview to a small group of partners. The reason was that the government had asked OpenAI to do it like that. In a memo on Thursday, Altman added that the government would be approving access customer by customer during this preview period. Altman did say in the Thursday memo, we've made clear to the US government that this is not our preferred long-term model and we'll work with them and others in industry to achieve a more sustainable approach for future releases. But here we are. If you are sensing a bit of snark, vitriol, acrimony in my tone, you are indeed picking up on that correctly. The best I can tell from the outside is that while Anthropic didn't handle themselves particularly well with regard to the government, mostly this whole thing started by the US government not really having paid attention until a different company, Amazon, told them that Mythos could do a thing that Anthropic had been clear that Mythos could do. And now we have the worst possible outcome, which is, as Neil Chilson put it, arbitrary unknown non-transparent license requirements are far worse than red tape.
Mauschewitz said, The new AI policy is that the White House decides ad hoc for whatever reasons it likes, who does and does not get access to frontier intelligence. This seems, rather, maximally terrible. And Andrew Curran reminds, For the people saying this is a pause or a victory for safety, it is not. This does not slow development in any way. It only slows the rate at which the labs can release the models, not how fast they can train them. The gap between what is available to the public and what the labs have internally will steadily widen from this day forward. This actually makes no one happy. And it's not just that it makes no one happy, it is good for no one. I very, very much hope that the White House can get its act together and or that Congress can step in and, you know, do its job so that we're not left with this incredibly capricious scenario that makes literally everyone worse off.