AI access fight divides Trump's tech allies

The pro-AI movement is splintering over a defining question: whether national security concerns outweigh the need to keep America's AI companies ahead of Chinese rivals. David Sacks—President Trump's former AI and crypto czar—warned that restricting access to America's most advanced AI models risks undercutting the strategy President Trump laid out just a year ago. "A year ago, President Trump declared that America was in a global AI race and that the way to win it was to be pro-innovation," Sacks wrote on X. "President Trump was exactly right. We deviate from that strategy at our peril." The response comes after the White House asked OpenAI to delay a broad rollout of its latest model, GPT-5.6, which will now be released in stages, following a similar directive that forced Anthropic to suspend access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models. Mythos is back online on a limited basis after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Anthropic's work with the government had "yielded significant progress." Fable 5 could return soon. "This is how you crash the U.S. AI market," said Kevin Bankston, AI governance advisor at the Center for Democracy and Technology.