Trump Tightens Grip On AI, Asks OpenAI To Limit GPT-5.6 Release

The Trump administration has asked OpenAI to stagger the release of an upcoming powerful artificial intelligence model, according to a person familiar with the matter, nearly two weeks after rival Anthropic PBC suspended its most capable offerings from the market under regulatory pressure.

OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman told employees on Wednesday that the US government requested that it initially release GPT-5.6 to a short list of trusted partners before pushing it out more widely, said the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private information.

In the meeting with staffers, Altman said that the US government has grown more anxious about the capabilities of the most cutting-edge models, the person said. Altman stressed that staffers need to work with the Trump administration on any input that officials may have on safety and restrictions related to OpenAI's upcoming models, even if the company disagrees, the person said. Altman did not explicitly mention the Anthropic situation, the person said.

Initially, the model will be released to 20 partners, the person said, adding that a path to access it will be via Amazon's Bedrock software platform.

OpenAI declined to comment. A White House official said the Trump administration continues to collaborate with frontier AI labs to develop shared approaches for addressing the challenges of scaling the technology. The Information previously reported some details of the meeting. 

Anthropic shut off global access to its two most advanced AI offerings, Mythos 5 and Fable 5, earlier this month after the government ordered the company to restrict foreign nationals inside and outside the US from using the models, citing national security concerns. Anthropic has since held talks with the US government in an effort to restore access to the models.

The unprecedented move by the US government underscored the Trump administration's newfound willingness to exert control over the burgeoning AI sector and served as a wake-up call for some in the industry. OpenAI, like Anthropic, has been racing to deploy new models that are more adept at a range of tasks, from coding to cybersecurity.

Employees at OpenAI are also concerned about how the government's actions against Anthropic could impact the ChatGPT maker's ability to roll out its technology widely, according to people familiar with the matter. 

Anthropic previously said it believes the US government issued the order after discovering that it's possible to "jailbreak," or bypass the guardrails of, Fable 5, a recently released version of Mythos that the company blocked from carrying out cybersecurity tasks.

"We disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people," Anthropic said in a post on its website. "If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers."

Currently AI labs are left to create their own ad-hoc processes for letting the government know about upcoming powerful AI models, one person said. In advance of introducing a new AI model, it's not clear who in government should be briefed, when to brief them, how much detail to share and how far in advance of a launch to do it, the person said.

Some in the AI sector hope that an executive order signed earlier this month by President Donald Trump may make the process clearer, one person said. The directive gave 60 days from the signing for the Trump administration and AI companies to come up with a voluntary framework that, among other things, gives the government access to so-called "frontier" models for up to 30 days before they are planned to be released. 

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)