The Fight Over Which AI Models You Can Use

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:00)
Today on the AI Daily Brief, why everyone is debating AI policy, and the battle for the future of open source AI.
The AI Daily Brief is the daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. Today's episode is one of those ones where the headlines are all kind of connected to the main episode, we're just doing it as one big episode. We will be back presumably with our normal format between headlines and main tomorrow, but for now, let's talk the battle around open AI.
Before we get into today's show, let me pitch you on why you should pay attention. Now, if you're listening, maybe you don't need to be pitched, but my observation over the past few years of doing this show is that there is a big chunk of this audience who is primarily focused on how AI matters for you. Specifically, this part of the audience cares about new models and changes and harnesses the way that we access those models. They are primarily interested in how AI is going to change their work and their careers and what they do. They're interested in how AI opens up new opportunities for them. And this is, of course, why a lot of this show is biased towards the highly actionable. It's also why, almost inevitably, there is a little dip in engagement around shows that are more on the policy side or on the macro big picture geopolitics side. Today's show is entirely about that. But my very strong argument is that what we are discussing today is an area of policy and geopolitics that could have dramatic implications for what models you have access to, how you access them, the cost at which you access them, the ways that you design systems for work, the tools that are available to you to design those systems. The stakes, in other words, are extremely high, not just on some random theoretical level, but in terms of the AI that you actually access. What's more, this particular area is a policy discussion which blends into democratic politics in the US in a major way. And so I believe and hope is worthy of your engagement. So what we're talking about today is, of course, the increasingly loud political questions around open source. And specifically but not exclusively, we're talking about Chinese open weight models and whether they have a future in the US.
Now the genesis for this, of course, is the release of Kimi K-3, the model that was the subject of discussion in our Friday episode. Now at this point, you might be a little anesthetized to every time there is some new advanced Chinese model, everyone having a freak out in the style of the original deep seek freak out back from January 2025 It's almost at this point kind of expected. And yet honestly, since that first deep seek moment back in January, I haven't seen something dominate the discourse quite as loudly as this has over the last few days. Pretty much all anyone talked about all weekend was a tweet from Dean Ball, former policy advisor to the Trump administration on AI, now head of strategic futures at OpenAI, which became just incredibly contentious and controversial, as we will see, generating at this point 11 million views.
But before we get into Dean's post, let's take a step back and talk about what we know so far around the US's position over open source, as well as the latest out of China around their strategy.
Over the past couple of weeks, there have been a growing set of reports that suggest that the White House is taking a closer look at taking action against open models. Last Wednesday, Washington Insider publication Semaphore reported that the administration was considering or at least not ruling out action on open source models, with a senior White House official confirming that there was, quote, plenty of ongoing work that went beyond the cybersecurity executive order from June.
At the very least, it's very clear that the White House is paying close attention to open models. Now, of course, the White House's relationship with models in general is in something of a flux moment. On Friday, CNBC reported that the administration expects to limit the release of Western frontier models on an ongoing basis. CNBC highlighted the limits around Fable 5 and GPT 5.6, but also tied the policy to the new AI clearinghouse announced last week named Gold Eagle. It was originally believed and frankly framed, like the clearinghouse would be mostly about sharing software vulnerabilities detected by AI, but sources indicate that Gold Eagle will also be the mechanism to determine which companies have access to new frontier models. On the record, a White House official said the government doesn't require approval of AI models and any engagement is still voluntary, asserting that, quote, decisions on timing and scope of releases rest entirely with the companies. Now, I'm sorry to be cynical, but that is absolutely not the case anymore, as we have seen. And the White House can pretend that this regime is voluntary all at once, but functionally speaking, that is no longer the case. The only question is whether moving forward, the quote-unquote voluntary regime, that seemed to be over the last month, Howard Lutnick and Susie Wiles getting together and deciding when they thought Anthropic had eaten enough crow for them to allow them to re-release Fable 5 becomes actually something more formalized in the future.