Why OpenAI and Anthropic Are Becoming Consultants

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:01)
Today in the AI Daily Brief, as Anthropic and OpenAI both launch consulting ventures, we talk about why there is no AI transformation without or transformation.
Before that in the headlines, is the White House about to make a major reversal in its AI policy?
The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
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You can find that again linked from the AI Daily Brief website or at aidbtraining.com. Now with that out of the way, let's talk about this shift from the White House.
We have a bit of a weird one today. I worked up a full normal plan for the headlines with some extended emphasis on this White House AI vetting story. But between when I was preferring and when I started recording, we got more information that has basically forced me to do a not-all-that-common effective double main show. We don't have all the information yet, so we will come back and explore this as is necessary with additional information later in the week. But let's talk about the White House and their changing relationship with AI.
Yesterday, The New York Times reported that the administration was weighing up a vetting process that would put the government in charge of assessing and improving the release of powerful AI models. Sources said that an executive order could be issued to set up a working group to consider potential oversight procedures. The working group would include tech executives and administration officials. And among the potential plans, wrote The New York Times, was a formal government review process for new AI models. Another consideration was a plan to give government first access to new models, but not necessarily block public release. The administration apparently met with executives from Anthropic, Google and OpenAI last week to discuss the plans. And sources noted that the UK's review process, which involves multiple government agencies assessing new models against safety standards, was viewed as a potential framework to replicate. Now it's pretty impossible to see this as anything but a stark reversal of administration policy. One of the core objectives of this particular administration was to unwind restrictive regulations. Specifically, the Trump administration removed power from the USAI Safety Institute, or USAISI, which is housed within the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Based on Biden-era policies, the USAISI performs safety testing on any model with more than 100 billion parameters, which for reference frontier models are currently well over a trillion parameters. And on day one, the Trump admin revoked the executive order that made government safety testing mandatory, shifting to a voluntary system. During the Biden years, regulation was headed towards giving the government a more formal role, and the power to hold back public releases for models deemed to have safety or security issues. These proposals were primarily discussed in relation to the California state government with the SB 1047 bill in late 2024 However, there is a sense that these regulations would filter up to the federal level during a possible second Biden term. The Trump administration, meanwhile, explicitly rejected this concept, asserting that regulatory delays could risk the US falling behind in the AI race with China. In his first public speech as vice president, JD Vance told world leaders at the AI Action Summit in Paris that, quote, excessive regulation of the AI sector could kill a transformative industry just as it's taking off. At a July event last year, the president referred to the AI industry as a baby, commenting, We have to grow that baby and let that baby thrive. We can't stop it. We can't stop it with politics. We can't stop it with foolish rules and even stupid rules. Now, the New York Times attributed the change of thinking to the rollout of mythos. Anthropic, of course, has famously declined to release the model to the public, saying that it's so powerful at identifying security vulnerabilities and software that it could lead to a cybersecurity reckoning. The New York Times administration sources commented that the White House is concerned about political repercussions if a devastating AI-enabled cyberattack were to occur. Another contributing factor is the departure of AI czar David Sacks, who left the administration in March after exhausting his 130-day limit on working as a special government employee. In his wake, Treasury Secretary Scott Besson and White House Chief of Staff Suzy Wiles have reportedly stepped in to take over the AI portfolio, which whatever you think about them as individuals neither has any sort of tech industry experience, presumably making it pretty difficult for them to assess the current situation regarding mythos. The idea of the government vetting AI models surfaced some very strong views. Zach Lilly, the Director of Government Affairs at NetChoice, posted, This would be a terrible blow to American AI competitiveness. No need to return to Biden-era regulatory impulses. Innovation at the speed of government isn't innovation at all. Bef Jaisos commented, Very bad idea. Administrations of the future will force labs to imbue the biases of their side into models in order to get sign-off. This will also reduce the number of labs who can ship models having to deal with compliance. I cannot advise against this strongly enough. Relatively few are super keen on this idea. Some of the AI safety folks are directionally aligned with this type of policy, but pretty skeptical of its source. The most vocal support came from the China-Hot contingent, with Chris McGuire from the Council on Foreign Relations tweeting, This is a sorely needed regulatory pivot with substantial geopolitical implications. If the US government vets models pre-release and presumably requires companies to include certain safeguards, it also needs a global plan to preserve their security post-release. He went on to describe a system where the US government exerts control over global cloud services and distribution of frontier model weights, directly advocating for a return of an even stronger version of the Biden-era diffusion rule. Now, interestingly, unrelatedly, but on the same day, the New York Times published a guest essay by former Trump AI Policy Advisor Dean Ball and his Biden administration counterpart Ben Buchanan. They wrote, We come from different parties and have guided AI policy under very different presidents, but we agree, AI has become so powerful that, along with its tremendous promise, the technology poses immediate risks to national security.