AIVetting Foreign AI Talent: Security Without Exclusion
Two recent Trump Administration actions have sent mixed messages about whether foreign-person employees can keep contributing to frontier AI development at U.S. companies. The better course is to publish a clear, risk-based framework for vetting sensitive foreign-person access.
Two recent Trump Administration actions have sent mixed messages about whether foreign-person employees can keep contributing to frontier AI development at U.S. companies.
On June 12, 2026, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) informed Anthropic that a license would be required to export, reexport, or transfer its Claude Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models to all destinations worldwide and all foreign persons, wherever located, including the release of the model to a foreign person in the United States. Unable to screen its users by nationality, Anthropic suspended global access to both models, including preventing its own foreign-person employees from accessing the models. On June 30, after two weeks of negotiation, the Commerce Department lifted the controls, and Anthropic began restoring access. But the resolution was specific to those models. The threat of similar action against future models, from any lab, remains.
The Information reported that the June 12 letter revived industry-wide concern over a crackdown on foreign AI talent, and that administration officials had earlier floated barring foreign employees at U.S. labs from frontier-model access before industry pushback kept the idea out of the June executive order.
A week before the Anthropic letter, however, National Security Presidential Memorandum 11 directed the Pentagon, the Department of Energy, and the intelligence community to build partnerships with willing AI companies to secure the most advanced models, and it listed “assisting with personnel vetting” among the forms that assistance may take. Vetting assistance would be particularly valuable for ensuring that foreign-person employees can continue contributing to AI development efforts at U.S. frontier labs.
In previous research, we have shown that frontier-model outputs can, in some cases, constitute export-controlled technology or technical data on a transaction-by-transaction basis. This risk is heightened for foreign-person employees in sensitive roles who have access to powerful unreleased models, model weights, source code, and evaluation workflows. For example, a pre-deployment chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) or cyber evaluation could release controlled information to whoever runs it. Thus, even if the model itself is not controlled, access to the model raises export control compliance questions. To the extent that the administration decides to control mere access to models, independent of particular outputs, access by foreign-person employees becomes even more central.
