White House Will Ad Hoc Decide Who Can Individually Access GPT-5.6
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White House Will Ad Hoc Decide Who Can Individually Access GPT-5.6
Zvi Mowshowitz<br>Jun 26, 2026
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We have a new standard policy for releasing frontier AI models. It is not good.<br>We are now, it seems, going to have the White House individually, in an opaque ad hoc manner, deciding who can access which frontier AI models when.<br>One hopes we will at least transition this into a predictable and formal set of procedures for determining what to do. But we spent years not laying the groundwork for doing that, and now here we are.<br>Essentially everyone should read the first half of this post, to understand what happened, and my speculations on what it means going forward for AI and America.<br>Only those who care and find it relevant to their interests should proceed to the second half, which addresses the blame game about how we got here, and claims that things would be better if people stopped speaking truth.<br>Table of Contents
Part 1: A Maximally Terrible Policy.
What Does This Mean For Fable?
Solve For The Equilibrium.
The Once And Future Fable.
Part 2: The Blame Game.
A Parable.
What About the Recent Executive Order?
The Problem Is Real.
Part 1: A Maximally Terrible Policy
Stephanie Palazzolo: New w/ @leomschwartz @amir:
The Trump admin has asked OpenAI to stagger the release of GPT-5.6 over security concerns.
On Thursday, CEO Sam Altman told staff that the government will be approving access to GPT-5.6 customer by customer, a highly unusual approach.<br>Jeffrey Ladish: Decent evidence that the Mythos ban wasn’t just the government targeting Anthropic<br>Samuel Hammond: We went from zero AI regulation to CFIUS-but-for-API-access in about a week.
I am happy that this suggests our policy is not primarily ‘try to murder or cripple Anthropic in particular,’ or at least that they will not be too hypocritical around that.<br>I am happy that our policy is not going to continue to be the previous policy of ‘do nothing, impose no restrictions, gather no information, build no capacity, see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, lest we not beat the only evil we can speak, which is China.’<br>Ad hoc opaque politicized decisions from the White House on who gets frontier intelligence, however, is Not The Way. It is maximally Not The Way.<br>Axios: The source said the government intervened because GPT-5.6 has “Mythos-like” capability, not because the administration is suddenly taking a heavier hand.<br>“This is what’s happening with models of that caliber,” the source said. The models are so powerful that the administration wants to be sure the companies have adequate safeguards in place, the source added.
What is ‘Mythos-like’ capability? I expect there to be a lot of confusion about the distinction between the thing Mythos is actually uniquely able to do, versus being able to replicate any individual finding. It is possible GPT-5.6 is ‘Mythos-like’ but my guess is it will be good but not be that Mythos-like.<br>Altman, in this case, is highly on point, but has no choice but to play ball:<br>Sam Altman: We’ve made clear to the U.S. government that this is not our preferred long term model, and will work with them and others in industry to achieve a more sustainable approach for future releases.
Thus, do not consider this new policy a victory.<br>Andrew Curran: 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 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. The old ‘AGI has been developed internally’ joke will absolutely come true now though, long before it is available to the public.<br>This also means Chinese models are almost certainly going to be restricted in some way - possibly even banned - in the West. Right now they’re roughly nine months behind. If every American frontier release is forced into a slow, staggered rollout from now on, they’ll start closing that gap immediately.<br>Over time, this destroys Western labs business models, because users will eventually have access to genuinely equivalent open-source alternatives - and in time, even better ones! The US government will not allow that to happen. The only way to prevent it is if China agrees to the same staggered release schedule (unlikely but I suppose it’s possible), keeping the gap roughly where it is today. Otherwise, the US will likely restrict or ban Chinese models. There’s probably a nine-month window, at most, probably a lot less, before one of those outcomes plays out.<br>It also means the probability that NVIDIA eventually gets restricted to within US borders just got way higher. It’s a lot harder for GPUs to wind up in China if they are a national resource. I wrote...