White House Will Ad Hoc Decide Who Can Individually Access GPT-5.6

We have a new standard policy for releasing frontier AI models. It is not good. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Jeffrey Ladish: Decent evidence that the Mythos ban wasn’t just the government targeting Anthropic 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. 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.’ A