TO new Politico report makes for fascinating, if somewhat amusing, reading at this point. It seems that Big AI wants the Trump Administration to speak out loudly about what is wrong, and generally speaking, believes it was inevitable that it would eventually crack down as it has recently done with Anthropic. But he also wants to bring back the old Trump Administration, the one that said AI should not be regulated.
Dean Ball, recently hired at OpenAI for a role called “Head of Strategic Futures”, explain it like this in the Politico story:
“There are things that the administration is doing that I’m not a big fan of, in terms of bluntness and opacity and rigor, but the most fundamental point is that I’m glad that they’ve come to the conclusion that they need to take these things seriously.”
When I was about nine years old and sitting down to have a tooth extracted, before my dentist even put a bib on me, he held up his tool tray. I remember an intimidatingly huge, all-metal syringe; a pair of thick-walled pliers with textured handles like those you might see in a garage; and a disconcertingly large, flat, blunt thing that looks like a tow truck driver could use it to open a locked car. All of these objects were about to be put in my mouth, and my dentist was right not to want me to be surprised by it.
In a somewhat similar spirit, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman went before Congress in 2023 and saying“I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go pretty wrong. And we want to have our say on that,” adding, “We want to work with the government to prevent that from happening.”
In his essay “The adolescence of technology“Dario Amodei wrote that humanity’s ability to overcome the upheaval that AI is about to cause, “will depend on our character and our determination as a species, our spirit and our soul.” And he added that “the years ahead of us will be incredibly hard and will ask more of us than we think we can give.”
This is going to hurt They seemed to be saying, and we don’t want to be the ones to blame if that happens. Altman and Amodei may well have been disingenuous when they said these things, but they were also right.
One crucial difference between big AI and a dentist is that America hasn’t actually asked Sam Altman or Dario Amodei to pull our metaphorical teeth. The dentists have arrived spontaneously. They do not have certifications. And they’re making huge promises about America’s smile that, frankly, most of us find impossible to take seriously.
But we have to give them credit for one thing: at least they show us what’s on the tray.
And we don’t like that. “Only 15% of Americans said they trust AI companies to make decisions about how AI is developed and used.” That’s a quote from a blog post on the Anthropic website about a survey made by anthropo.
7 out of 10 of us oppose data centers in our area. We are pessimistic about AI in general and want its development to slow down.
Perhaps most revealing in the current circumstances, 87% Many of us say that it is “very likely” or “somewhat likely” that within the next 20 years “foreign governments will (use) artificial intelligence technology to attack the United States.”
But when they took office, President Trump and Vice President Vance signaled what I guess you could call courage regarding AI that the public was not asking for. in his famous Paris speech in February 2025, Vance essentially said that no regulation was coming and that everyone better get used to it. Attempts to regulate AI, he said, “would not only unfairly benefit incumbents in the space, but would mean crippling one of the most promising technologies we have seen in generations.”
In other words, Vance didn’t care what was on the dentist’s tray. He had heard the promises the AI dentists had made about America’s smile, and he didn’t want anyone else to have the new high-tech super smile except America.
For the most part, that has been the Trump Administration’s position on AI since then. Its biggest brush with regulation before this month was when it declared Anthropic a supply chain risk. But that wasn’t because Anthropic’s metaphorical dental tools are scary and, in fact, potentially lethal. It was because the Trump Administration loves how potentially lethal they are. He wants to be told that they are the most lethal instruments in the world (whether true or just a marketing gimmick) and he wants to be the only one who has a say in how much lethality is applied and where.
So from a certain perspective, it’s been gratifying finally watch the Trump administration cringe at one of the dentist’s tools, Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 model, and momentarily put a stop to this entire unwanted dental procedure.
“The administration’s current actions have resulted in a near-complete moratorium on new launches,” a former Biden administration technology adviser named Saif Khan told Politico, adding, “And that will start to seriously impact companies’ bottom lines.”
Anthropic and its main competitor, OpenAI, are suffering together. When it comes to its new family of AI models, the GPT 5.6 series, OpenAI is make it seem like everything is going according to plan. It will make them available to a small group of VIP customers and will work with the Trump Administration to figure out how to implement them without having its privileges revoked, as Anthropic did earlier this month with its Fable 5 model. But if you go deeper into your blog postOpenAI seems frustrated. “We do not believe this type of government access process should become the default in the long term,” the company wrote.
“It feels like they’re walking on eggshells a little bit,” an unnamed policy advisor for frontier AI companies told Politico in their report.
But as my colleague pointed out yesterday:
“Meanwhile, as cybersecurity experts were quick to point out after the Fable/Mythos ban, rival labs in China will be able to take advantage of the disarray by pushing their own AI development, while labs in the US are stuck trying to figure out what is and isn’t allowed in them.”
Earlier this month, more than a week before Anthropic’s export control directive on models, the Trump Administration issued an Executive Order requesting (not requiring) AI companies to submit their models for a federal investigation. In its blog post about the GPT 5.6 models, OpenAI claims to be working with the Trump Administration to “develop the Cyber Executive Order framework and a repeatable process for future model releases.”
But the US regulation plan has so far sidestepped the need for real laws passed by Congress governing AI’s capabilities and its role in our lives. What is right and wrong for AI companies to do these days is a question of whether or not Donald Trump is satisfied with what he is seeing. He obviously doesn’t like jailbreakable railings, like Fable 5 supposedly could, and he apparently doesn’t like them. China-Linked Groups Gain Unwanted Access to frontier models during periods when they are supposed to only be available to VIPs.
Leaving aside any dreams about what AI could do in fantastical future scenarios, we know what it does and we don’t like it. In other words, we now live in the painful future that the big AI CEOs warned us was coming, and the president finally stopped the dental procedure. The problem is that it seems like almost nothing is about to change, and start again.
