Tech Companies Scramble to Respond to Shifting White House AI Policies

Early in his first year back in office, Trump tore up President Biden’s executive order that sought to establish a broad regulatory framework for AI safety, security and oversight, despite broad support for order’s long list of AI priorities. Trump then spent much of 2025 and early 2026 keeping the federal government’s hand off the AI sector and trying to prevent states from regulating the technology.

The arrival of powerful new models from Anthropic and OpenAI prompted the Trump administration to abruptly change course. On Friday, OpenAI announced that the administration would decide initially who gets access to the ChatGPT-maker’s most powerful model. At the same time, however, the administration announced it would partially rescind portions of its previously imposed export ban on Anthropic’s most advanced model. Yet, another Anthropic model, Fable 5, remains blocked by the White House for reasons the administration has not explained.

That left tech companies, as well as members of Congress, guessing as to what the administration’s policy is.

There’s a “real need for a formal process,” Paul Lekas, head of global public policy and government affairs at the Software & Information Industry Association trade group, which represents some of the leading AI companies, told Politico. “We want to avoid a situation where the release of any model or piece of software is based on an ad hoc process and a one-off license process,” Lekas said.

Read more: House Republican Introduces Bill Requiring AI Firms to Report Serious Safety Incidents

But the industry representatives also said they’re wary of pushing the White House for answers, per Politico, lest they end up hit with export controls or other blunt tools of regulation. “It feels like they’re walking on eggshells a little bit,” said one AI policy adviser who works with major frontier labs, told the Washington tipsheet.

After weeks of debate, Trump signed an executive order in early June that laid out a voluntary vetting process for companies developing advanced AI models. Before the order was implemented, however, the White House went much further by imposing export controls on Anthropic’s Mythos 5 and Fable models, blocking the company from releasing its new product over potential security concerns. This week, the administration pressured OpenAI to restrict the release of its new GPT-5.6 model to a small group of partners approved by the administration.

Saif Khan, a former adviser on emerging technology in the Biden administration, told Politico the Trump administration’s actions an overreaction to predictable safety concerns, and criticized its ad hoc policy approach. “Because there has been some dismissiveness of the risks, there’s been no preparatory work, no hiring of experts that you need to do this work,” Khan said. “And now you have this opaque, almost vibes-based system for what is going to get approved and what’s not.”

Khan called the current approach far more damaging to AI than anything the Biden administration had attempted, including its imposition of export controls on certain semiconductors and model weights.

“The administration’s current actions have resulted in an almost complete moratorium on new releases,” Khan said. “And that’s going to start seriously impacting companies’ bottom lines.”