May 6, 2026 — 11:58am
Until Anthropic’s Mythos model triggered alarm bells, the Trump administration labelled efforts to put guardrails around artificial intelligence as “woke”. Now it is scrambling to erect some of its own.
Earlier this week, the White House said it had reached an agreement with Google, Microsoft and xAI that would enable the US Commerce Department’s Centre for AI Standards and Innovation to “conduct pre-deployment evaluations and targeted research” on AI models before they were released.
Those reviews, it said, would enable the government to assess the capabilities of frontier models and their national security implications. Donald Trump is considering issuing an executive order to formalise early government access to the models.
Anthropic and OpenAI voluntarily signed similar agreements with the Biden administration to allow the government to assess and counter safety, security and privacy risks and help develop standards for AI development.
