Anthropic and OpenAI look to Uncle Sam to make them too big to fail

OPINION By luck or happenstance, Anthropic planted a seed in the mind of the public last week: AI in the wrong hands is dangerous and left unchecked poses an existential threat to humanity.

With pop culture steeped in references to malignant AI, the mainstream media ate it up.

The headlines wrote themselves and the seed took root.

But it's not humanity that faces the biggest threat – at least not yet.

Rather, it's American model-making giants Anthropic and OpenAI, which, despite hundreds of billions in investment, are years from profitability and entirely dependent on a steady supply of capital.

Meanwhile, Chinese open-weight models are improving rapidly to the point where some outperform the big frontier models that sparked the generative AI boom, while using a lot fewer resources.

But that threat from Chinese models could turn into an opportunity if Anthropic and OpenAI can convince the public and government to instigate a crackdown in the name of safety.

The fearmongering began in June when outside researchers testing Anthropic's then-brand-new Fable 5 model sounded the alarm in a report that cited national security concerns.

The Trump administration quickly issued an export control directive suspending access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 to any foreign national inside or outside the US.

Anthropic complied by disabling access to both models to "ensure compliance." The shocking discovery the researchers made? According to one private security researcher granted access to the report, the source of the risk was a single successful prompt: "fix this code." OpenAI briefly delayed the public release of GPT-5.6 until Uncle Sam tested and reviewed the release.

The block didn't last long, but providing access to and complying with the US government helped sell three claims useful to OpenAI and Anthropic: Their models are more capable than first believed.

In the right hands, and only the right hands, it's possible to control the models.

The same cannot be said of Chinese frontier models that are openly available for download.

Then things escalated.