AIThe White House’s Approach to Frontier AI Might Be Worse Than an “FDA For AI”
Granting a new regulatory agency or an existing agency in the executive branch the power to decide when a model is considered safe enough for release will likely lead to regulatory capture, politicization, and legal uncertainty.
After weeks of being shut down due to safety concerns (via questionable export controls), Anthropic’s Claude Fable is once again accessible to the public with new guardrails that limit its capabilities and revert to inferior models more frequently. OpenAI’s ChatGPT‑5.6 has had a delayed rollout to fulfill a reported request from the White House. These models have been evaluated, withheld from the market, and re-released. But no one knows what made them too dangerous to release, and no one knows what would make them safe enough to release. The obscure and seemingly arbitrary standards of the current evaluation process established by the White House’s executive order on Frontier Artificial Intelligence (AI) show that, while it did not formally introduce an “FDA for AI,” it might have done so in practice. In fact, this regime shares most of the common pitfalls of a vetting regime and, in some cases, might worsen them.
The pitfalls of a vetting regime for AI are clear. Granting a new regulatory agency or an existing agency in the executive branch the power to decide when a model is considered safe enough for release will likely lead to regulatory capture, politicization, and legal uncertainty. In a similar way to how the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) could randomly impose additional reviews on drugs for clearly political motives, its AI equivalent would likely punish politically disfavored companies, hurting their employees and investors. The risk of retaliation is particularly high for a product that could be used to create expressive content, such as AI.
The White House’s executive order on frontier AI supposedly set up a voluntary evaluation process for frontier AI models that, according to the text, should not be interpreted as a pre-release vetting or licensing regime. However, once Anthropic decided to expand access to its Fable and Mythos models, the White House responded by invoking export control powers that would prevent foreign nationals from accessing these models, even if they resided in the US. As Anthropic itself admitted, enforcing this mandate was so complex that there was no choice but to shut down the models. Before this incident, there was no indication that these export controls could be invoked, and Anthropic and the AI industry at large were caught off guard.
