A new report from Politico sounds interesting, if somewhat amusing, to read now. It seems Big AI wants the Trump administration to speak out with a clear voice about what’s not right, and largely thinks it was inevitable that it would eventually take action on Anthropic. But he also wants back the old Trump administration — which said AI shouldn’t be regulated.
Dean Ball, who was recently appointed to a position called “head of strategic futures” at OpenAI, put it this way in a Politico story:
“[T]There are things that the administration is doing that I’m not so much a fan of in terms of the suddenness and vagueness and strictness, but more fundamentally I’m glad that they’ve come to the conclusion that they’re going to take this thing seriously.
When I was about nine years old and sitting in to get a tooth pulled, my dentist picked up his tray of tools before even putting the bib on me. I remember an intimidatingly huge, completely metal syringe; A thick-walled pair of honest-to-God pliers with textured grips, like the ones you might see in the garage; And a large, flat, blunt thing that looks like something a tow truck driver might use to open a locked car. All these things were going to be put in my mouth, and my dentist was wise to not want me to be surprised about it.
It was in a similar sentiment that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman went before Congress in 2023 and said, “I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go horribly wrong. And we want to be vocal about that,” adding, “We want to work with the government to prevent that from happening.”
In his essay “The Adolescence of Technology”, Dario Amodei writes that humanity’s ability to deal with the upheaval caused by AI will depend on “our character and our determination as a species, our soul and our spirit.” And added that, “The years ahead of us will be impossibly difficult, taking more than we think we can handle.”
This is going to hurt, He seemed to be saying, And if that happens, we don’t want to be blamed. Altman and Amodei may have been hypocrites when they said these things, but they were also right.
One key 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 dentist has come without permission. He does not have any certificate. And they’re making big promises about America’s smile that are frankly impossible for most of us to take seriously.
But you have to hand it to them for one thing: at least they’re showing us what’s in the tray.
And we are not involved in this. “Only 15% of Americans said they trust AI companies to make decisions about AI development and use.” This is a quote from a blog post on the Anthropic website about a survey Powered by Anthropic.
7 out of 10 of us oppose data centers in our area. We are generally pessimistic about AI and want development to slow down.
Perhaps most telling of the current circumstances, 87% of us say it is either “very likely” or “somewhat likely” that within the next 20 years.”[f]foreign governments [will use] AI technology to attack America”
But when they took office, President Trump and Vice President Vance indicated that I guess what you could say Valor Regarding AI which the public did not demand. In his famous Paris speech in February 2025, Vance essentially said that no regulation is coming, and that everyone had better get used to it. Efforts to regulate AI would not only give incumbents in the field an unfair advantage, he said, but would also mean crippling one of the most promising technologies seen in generations.
In other words, Vance didn’t care what was in the dentist’s tray. He had heard about the promises made by AI dentists about America’s smile, and he didn’t want anyone but America to have the new, high-tech super smile.
For the most part, this has been the Trump administration’s position on AI since then. Its one big brush with regulation earlier this month was when it declared Anthropic a supply chain risk. But that wasn’t because anthropomorphic dental instruments are scary – and in fact potentially deadly. That was because the Trump administration loves how potentially deadly they are. It wants to be told that they are the most lethal tools in the world – whether that’s true or just a marketing gimmick – and it wants to be the only one with the authority to say how much lethality is used and where.
So it’s been gratifying from a certain point of view At the end Watch the Trump administration pounce on one of the dentist’s devices, Anthropic’s Cloud Fable 5 model, and momentarily halt this entire unwanted dental procedure.
“The administration’s current actions have resulted in an almost complete halt to new releases,” a former Biden administration technology adviser named Saif Khan told Politico, “and this will begin to severely 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 seems like everything is going according to plan. It’s making them available to a small group of VIP customers, and it’s going to work with the Trump administration to figure out how to roll them out without revoking its privileges, as happened with Anthropic earlier this month with its Fable 5 models. But if you look at its blog post, OpenAI seems disappointed. “We do not believe this type of government access process should become the long-term default,” the company wrote.
“It feels like they’re walking on eggshells a little bit,” an unnamed policy adviser to frontier AI companies told Politico in its report.
But as my colleague noted yesterday:
“Meanwhile, as cybersecurity experts pointed out immediately after the Fable/Mythos ban, rival labs in China will be able to overcome this disorder by pursuing their own AI development, while labs in the US get stuck trying to figure out what they are allowed to do and what they are not.”
Earlier this month, more than a week before the export control directive on Anthropic’s models, the Trump administration issued an executive order requesting — not demanding — that AI companies submit their models for federal scrutiny. In its blog post about the GPT 5.6 model, OpenAI claims to be working with the Trump administration to develop “a cyber executive order framework and a repeatable process for future model releases.”
But the US regulation plan has so far ignored the need for real laws passed by Congress governing the capabilities of AI and its role in our lives. What is okay for AI companies to do and what not to do currently depends on whether Donald Trump is happy with what he is seeing. He apparently doesn’t like guardrails that can be broken from prison, as was reportedly the case in Fable 5, and he reportedly doesn’t like China-linked groups gaining unwanted access to Borderlands models during a period where they should only be available to VIPs.
Putting aside any dreams of what AI could do in any hypothetical future scenario, we know what it does, and we don’t like it. In other words, we are now living in the painful future that big AI CEOs warned us was coming, and the President has finally stopped the dental procedure. The problem is that it seems like he’s going to change almost nothing, and is going to start all over again.
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