Not long ago, I was talking with someone from the national security world and I mentioned, almost in passing, that I had been working on AI policy for nearly a decade.
They laughed. “No one cared about AI until Mythos.”
The line stayed with me. In part, it bothered me because it captured my frustration with the sudden influx of people into AI policy with little technical background and even less policy experience. But it also lingered because the remark was fundamentally true. Mythos changed the terms on which governance is now being discussed. It altered the calculus.
Before Anthropic’s Mythos was unveiled in early April, the administration had a staunchly pro-innovation stance, best exemplified by the 2025 AI Action Plan. It used to be the case that models could be trained, tested, and then freely deployed. That is giving way to something new, an ad hoc licensing regime.
The first sign of this new posture came on June 2, when the Trump administration issued an executive order creating a new classified benchmarking process. Then, on June 12, the Commerce Department placed an export restriction on Mythos and its publicly available derivative, Fable 5, restricting all access to the models. On June 30, the Department of Commerce lifted those export controls.
While Anthropic has only made vague statements about what technically changed, Secretary Lutnick explained the terms of the surrender: “Anthropic has agreed to proactively detect and address security risks associated with the models; to work diligently with the U.S. government on protocols and standards and releases for Mythos, Fable, and future models; and to inform the U.S. government of any malicious activity.” Make no mistake about it, the Commerce Department strong-armed Anthropic into changing its safety protocols, ending an era.
The first half of 2026 marks the beginning of a new phase in AI governance. We have entered a zone of indistinction. Nothing has been formally suspended. No emergency decree has been issued and companies remain nominally free to release their models. Yet that freedom increasingly depends on satisfying standards devised in secret and enforced through discretionary executive power. The practical space to contest the government’s judgment has begun to contract.
The result is exactly what I told The Wall Street Journal, “We have entered a world where a frontier model is considered ‘secure’ when the government says so.”