Tom

JUST IN: 🇺🇸 US tells OpenAI to limit GPT 5.6 release while the government reviews it, The Information reports. CEO Sam Altman: "we've made clear to the US government that this is not our preferred long term model."

Anthropic has been publicly forced to bend the knee to the US government. The ban on Fable and Mythos reads like censorship, and the market will read it as the TAM of the frontier labs collapsing. Instead, I read this as the opposite, as an acceleration event... The government MUST have first access, because this is The Great Game, the game of nations over the most powerful technology ever discovered, and a technological edge of 30 to 60 days is worth everything. It's the same edge the labs already exploit internally. You build your next model with your unreleased frontier tech, never with the public one. That private head start is what keeps you accelerating ahead of the competition or at least in line with them. The US needs that exact advantage now. Before the public, and before the Chinese open source models can copy it. They have no choice. They cannot allow their own technology to be turned against them. What's being negotiated, in the usual outrageous, hard-ball Trump manner, is the new arrangement: Anthropic and OpenAI are free market operators and state vassals at the same time. Nobody wants to curtail their growth. The Gov just wants to be Customer Number 1 with privileged access. This is the East India Company all over again. A private enterprise left free to grow rich and dominant, granted protection and a clear run by the state, on the unspoken condition that it serves the crown's strategic interests first. That charter was the price of the monopoly. It also sends a message to China and everyone else that US AI is now so advanced the state itself has to control it. They won't, not yet anyway. They just want privileged access, the rest is posturing. And Anthropic will bend the knee, very soon... The hidden outcome is the one that matters. The AI firms are now near-explicitly too big to fail, which means the debt funding the capex buildout comes with an implicit state guarantee. That accelerates the build-out of intelligence. It doesn't curtail it... Open source accelerates too, because going open ensures no state can intervene in the model itself. Though the same Great Game rules apply there, and the Chinese state will take its own privileged access first. So the market may wobble, convinced the TAM of AI just collapsed. The real outcome is an acceleration of intelligence, and a Super Cycle that keeps running.