Anthropic and OpenAI Now Face Identical Government Model Curbs

The rivalry between Anthropic and OpenAI has structured how the AI industry is covered and understood for years. TechCrunch's Russell Brandom argues this week that US government model controls have made that competition a secondary concern. Two weeks after the government pulled Anthropic's Fable and Mythos models, OpenAI's GPT 5.6 is reportedly headed for the same situation: The Information reported that it will be released only into limited preview, with the government approving access "customer by customer" before any general release can happen. Mythos, meanwhile, "has already been in preview for months, and there's no indication it will make it to general release any time soon."

The economic case Brandom makes is direct. "Even a few weeks spent in review could significantly limit the economic upside of a costly new system, at a time when AI labs are trying desperately to improve their bottom lines." The knock-on effects extend further: if the pace of model development slows as a result, he writes, it's likely to "put a similar chill on the ongoing data center buildout."

The structural problem underneath all of this is that no one has defined what passing looks like. "It's not clear what kind of safety assurances could be put in place to satisfy regulators," Brandom writes, and "the U.S. government doesn't have the expertise or capacity for the kind of testing that would be needed." Neither lab can design a compliance pathway around criteria that haven't been stated.

That's why, Brandom argues, neither company can negotiate its way out individually: "the cost of implementing a haphazard government approval process for every frontier model is obvious, and there's no fix that helps one lab without helping the others." The prescription he points toward is collective action, including lining up behind "the least-bad regulatory options available, instead of fighting every regulation tooth and nail." What the piece doesn't give you is a concrete picture of what that coordination would actually look like, or whether the government has shown any interest in co-designing approval criteria rather than simply exercising veto power case by case.