ai-policy
Washington answers the AI pacing call: no moratorium from the Speaker, no rules from Trump, and Sacks says just do it News
On 13 September President Trump, House Speaker Mike Johnson and White House adviser David Sacks all answered Anthropic's call to pace frontier AI, and none offered new rules: Trump said whoever wins AI wins, Johnson ruled out an emergency moratorium, and Sacks told Anthropic and OpenAI to slow down on their own without antitrust exemptions.
Garry Tan says American open-weight labs should be free to distill closed frontier models News
Y Combinator chief executive Garry Tan said on 10 and 11 September 2026 that he would do nothing about AI model distillation and that US open-weight labs should be free to learn from closed American frontier models, putting him at odds with a federal advisory that treats distillation as a security threat.
Dario Amodei asks AI labs to pace the frontier, not pause it. Altman agreed to match one step. News
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay on 12 September 2026 calling for AI labs to slow the rate of capability gains through outside evaluators, government rules and international deals; the only step Anthropic commits to on its own is embedding third-party evaluators, which OpenAI's Sam Altman said OpenAI will also do.
OpenAI now says it will 'slow or stop' at an unacceptable risk. It has not said where that line is. News
OpenAI wrote on 9 September 2026 that it will slow or stop developing systems it cannot sufficiently safeguard and will not pursue fully autonomous recursive self-improvement until it can be done safely, but set no threshold or date; the same week, more than 70 UK lawmakers urged a superintelligence ban and President Trump said he had no extinction concerns.
No, the White House Isn't Licensing AI Models - Here's What EO 14409 Actually Sets Up News
Executive Order 14409 creates a voluntary US government pre-release access framework for "covered frontier models," thresholded by a classified NSA-led cyber-capability benchmark, and explicitly does not authorize mandatory licensing, preclearance, or permitting of AI model releases.
LAPD lets its Flock license-plate surveillance contract lapse after false-positive stops News
LAPD allowed its Flock Safety automated license-plate-reader contract to expire on July 11 after false alerts led to innocent drivers being stopped - a rare rollback of already-deployed AI surveillance on civil-liberties grounds.
200-plus experts sign 'WeMustActNow,' urging governments to prepare for AI job displacement News
More than 200 experts including Nobel laureates signed a Stanford Digital Economy Lab statement urging governments to prepare now for AI-driven economic displacement, amid a concurrent survey signaling strong but methodologically thin public appetite for socializing AI gains.
OpenAI previews GPT-5.6 -- and shows it to the government first News
OpenAI previewed a three-model GPT-5.6 family on June 26 and released it only to a small set of vetted partners after briefing the U.S. government, making pre-launch government coordination a routine step for a frontier model.
Five Eyes spy chiefs: the AI cyber threat is months away, not years News
On June 23 the Five Eyes cyber agencies jointly warned that frontier AI will transform cyberattacks on a timeline of months rather than years, and urged organizations to fix foundational security now.
A New Campaign Argues You Have a Right to Run AI on Your Own Computer News
A grassroots advocacy site, Right to Local Intelligence, is campaigning against proposed state laws it says could require a license just to download and run open AI models, framing local AI as the next personal computer.
The ban on Anthropic's most powerful model just partially lifted -- for Americans only News
About a hundred U.S. institutions regain access to Mythos and Fable, while foreign nationals stay locked out and rival labs rush to fill the gap.
OpenAI showed off GPT-5.6 -- then handed the guest list to the US government News
Three new models, strong enough at hacking that OpenAI is only letting about twenty vetted partners in, at the government's request.
Anthropic Wants a Pause Button the Whole World Can Check News
Buried in Anthropic's essay is a concrete proposal: not to stop AI, but to build the machinery that would let rival labs prove to each other they had stopped.