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White House Considers Vetting A.I. Models Before They Are Released
- moneycantbuy 5mo agoso the trump mafia can corruptly profit from them?
- ahurmazda 5mo agoMobster admin so checks out “Nice model you got there… shame if someone prompt injected a regulatory framework into it.”
- roboror 5mo agogift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/04/technology/trump-ai-models.html?unlocked_article_code=1.f1A.pp2V.7pbcx8fV7IV7&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/04/technology/trump-ai-model...
- rascul 5mo ago"Black market AI" has a nice ring to it.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- HPsquared 5mo agoRobot pirates...
- 2ndorderthought 5mo agoThere's a reason they are going after VPNs as well right now. Uh oh.
- cayleyh 5mo agoWe're all living in a William Gibson novel now...
- OutOfHere 5mo agoChina doesn't require permission from the White House.
- dgellow 5mo agoMind elaborating instead of vague posting? Are you saying that China is already doing that vetting or that China will benefit because they can release models faster without having to be blocked by WH vetting?
- data-ottawa 5mo agoNot the OP, but: - China is the largest open weight provider, with Mistral and Cohere delivering a few other models. There isn’t much else internationally - (I think OP is suggesting) this would effectively ban Chinese models in the US, which would be an interesting case. Who knows if they could have theirs reviewed, or if we’ll see another FCC approved router situation. - that Chinese models are censored is a very common criticism. If American models are also censored that looks bad. - this will be awful for self hosters and local inference. Imagine if HuggingFace had to drop non-American model weights. That would effectively kill them.
- dgellow 5mo agoThanks!
- tzs 5mo ago> - that Chinese models are censored is a very common criticism. If American models are also censored that looks bad. It's even worse than that for American models. As an American, if I want to run a model locally and have to choose a censored model I will choose a Chinese censored model over an American censored model especially if it is the Trump administration doing the American censoring. Chinese censorship is mostly directed at things that would not reduce the usefulness of the model for my applications. I doubt that would be the case with Trump censorship. Same for products that spy on me. If a car for example is sending my travel log to Korea or the EU or China it is annoying but none of them are realistically going to do anything with the data that would seriously harm me. The risk is orders of magnitude higher if US governments or US law enforcement gets it.
- cozzyd 5mo agoThey will have to "correctly" answer who is the best president, is the straight of Hormuz blocked, and how tall should the ballroom be.
- dragonwriter 5mo agoMore to the point, the vendor will have to make the correct deals with and contributions to firms and foundations owned and operated by the President’s friends and family members.
- blurbleblurble 5mo agoWhy not all that and more?
- malshe 5mo agoAlso answer “correctly” who won the 2020 presidential election
- whyenot 5mo agoWishing a fond goodbye to the Gulf of Mexico.
- drivingmenuts 5mo agoI'm sticking to the ISO standard on that.
- thrill 5mo agoSure, let’s kill what little lead the US AI industry has while the rest of the world kicks ass - it’s working so well in all our other endeavors.
- aurareturn 5mo ago* Maybe Anthropic's call for regulation has backfired. Now it's going to be overregulation. They might regret it now. * This might be regulatory capture for OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. Any new entrant will have a harder time getting approval. * This is going to be terrible for the industry in general because this administration will not hesitate to demand bribes and force their propaganda into the models. * This might cause the US to ban the use of Chinese models for US businesses and governments. After all, Chinese models won't need white house approval to release. So the only way to "control" them is to simply make them illegal.
- segmondy 5mo agoNah, Anthropic would love this. They definitely don't want you using KimiK2.6, DeepSeekV4Pro, GLM5.1, MiniMax2.7, MimoV2.5-Pro, Qwen3.5-397B, Step3.5Flash, because, truth be told. You can survive fine without Claude.
- thedevilslawyer 5mo agoThis will not stop 8 billion other people in the world. After all, it is a competitive global world out there.
- JLO64 5mo agoA worst case scenario I feel is that the government could restrict inference providers within the US to run only approved/American LLMs, which would be a huge deal since the only recent American OSS model is Gemma. I could see OpenAI/Anthropic/Google lobbying for that though…
- aurareturn 5mo agoMy thought as well. They will approve every new American trained LLM but they can't control the release of free Chinese LLMs. Therefore, the only card they can play is to simply make Chinese LLMs illegal to use for American companies and Americans. Ultimately, this will grant more power to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google due to regulatory capture but it hurts the AI industry overall.
- 2ndorderthought 5mo agoOnly the us AI industry. It will put the US in a ditch with it's only asset being the ability to surveill its citizens for negative money and negative innovation. The rest of the world will keep spinning just fine
- victorbjorklund 5mo agoLet’s hope. It would be great for Europe and the rest of the world.
- dgellow 5mo agoUnless we (Europe) start to do the same…
- 2ndorderthought 5mo agoNah there's literally no reason geopolitically or economically to do that for Europe. The US has more or less entirely botched everything except it's military applications for AI. It's endangering the whole economy in the process too.
- tombert 5mo agoHow the fuck would this even be enforced? "AI model" is a pretty broad thing; in some sense basically anything involving weights could be considered "AI", and even more abstractly you could argue that even a runtime conditional is AI.
- dgellow 5mo agoHonestly, if we are discussing the „how“ I feel that we are already ceding too much ground. Whatever technical solutions exist it is a terrible precedent
- techblueberry 5mo ago> How the fuck would this even be enforced? Selectively, by whatever standard the administration desires in the whims of the moment.
- Hizonner 5mo agoUm, I realize the Trump administration doesn't pay a lot of attention to what it does and does not have authority to do, but I'm having trouble imagining what they'd even claim their authority was...
- CamperBob2 5mo agoEver see the old Twilight Zone episode with the 6-year-old kid who wishes you into the cornfield if you don't do what he says? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_a_Good_Life_(The_Twilight_Zone) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_a_Good_Life_(The_Twilig... That's his authority.
- joemi 5mo agoAll they have to do is say "national security" again and then they're in the clear (in their minds, at least).
- kelvinjps10 5mo agoMore inside trading and poly market betting
- enoint 5mo agoOnly MAIGA approved models are permitted to resolve bets on US prediction markets.
- changoplatanero 5mo agoI have many questions. How would A/B testing work in the scenario where models need to be approved by the government before release? All the big providers commonly a/b test their unreleased models on production traffic. Would these need to be preapproved? Many models get tested on the public for every one that is officially "released". Will the government have the bandwidth to examine each of these? Does changing the system prompt count as a different model or only model weights?
- aurareturn 5mo agoYou just perfectly highlighted why over-regulation in tech is troublesome. This is why I've always been against European tech regulations which gave us the cookie prompt. Politicians shouldn't be product designers. Edit: I'll take the downvotes. Every time I say this, I get downvoted. Weirdly, even EU politicians are beginning to see that they've over regulated their tech industry so much that it can't compete but HN just can't accept this opinion.
- guesswho_ 5mo agoCookie promots are not necessary for functional cookies.
- 2ndorderthought 5mo agoIt's because the actual goals have nothing to do with what they say they are.
- idle_zealot 5mo agoThe cookie prompt is a perfect example of under regulation. The law you're citing as over-regulation requires companies to get consent before tracking you. Companies across the board settled on "annoy users into consenting" as their compliance strategy. You want to revert to implied consent? Fuck that, layer on "also you can't pester users into agreeing to being tracked." Too vague? That's the point; anything else and you incentivize dancing on the line of exactly how close to non-compliance you can get away with. Politicians broadly shouldn't be product designers, but establishing broad no-go zones around anti-consumer behavior is foundational to modern society. Without that you get cartoon ads marketing menthol cigarettes to kids and commercials for casino apps for betting on drone strikes.
- sigmar 5mo agoWhat specifically is the goal of the pre-release review? Just to patch government systems first? Seems like the government was banning internal use of anthropic's models 2 months ago and now wants exclusive access for some amount of time. Clown show...
- winddude 5mo ago"The National Security Agency has also recently used Anthropic’s Mythos model to assess vulnerabilities in the U.S. government’s software, people with knowledge of the work said." I'm sure that's not the only thing they've used it for. Definitely looking for any exploit they can use to enhance data gathering, and cracking into IOS, private networks, etc. Gotta keep an eye on citizens, but hey, it's the only government body that really listens you. at this point it almost seems like citizens should review AI models before the government can access them.
- RIMR 5mo agoThe party of free market economics, everybody!
- int32_64 5mo agoIs there an arms race of payment infrastructure for international LLM providers? A common payment gateway so that people can pay providers anywhere for tokens will inevitably emerge if the US is making moves like this.
- rnxrx 5mo agoWouldn't this immediately put the American companies producing these models at a significant disadvantage? Just use an unmolested model hosted by a provider in Vancouver. If anything, this measure seems like it would create a scenario where services hosted outside the US would become a lot more attractive relative to Trumped AI.
- piloto_ciego 5mo agoThis is a really bad thing.
- giwook 5mo agoI wonder how much of this is geared towards actual public safety/"national security" versus the current administration wanting to use this as another form of leverage when AI companies (e.g. Anthropic) don't listen to them.
- yuriks 5mo agoI love corruption!
- silexia 5mo agoHow about if we vet them before they are built? Our species will all be killed if an unaligned superintelligence escapes containment.
- drivingmenuts 5mo agoOf course, they are. While this wasn't on my 2026 bingo card, I am absolutely not surprised.
- MisterTea 5mo agoWhat does this mean for open source models or models generated by individuals? This feels like an attempt to enact regulation capture where only the large AI vendors can afford to have their models vetted by the government.
- tomComb 5mo agoI think we know how this goes ... Administration officials will insist that this will be bipartisan and just for national security. Trump will then just come out and say it: that they won't authorize models that provide "fake news" such as him not winning the election by the most votes ever. There will be a big fuss as people and media point to this as the smoking gun, but then it will turn out that American voters just don't care. I guess we could learn to appreciate Mistral sooner than expected.
- blurbleblurble 5mo agoFor those among us who voted for this administration: what's the plan? More doubling down?
- insane_dreamer 5mo agoVetting process will likely consist of evaluating model output to the following question: "who won the 2020 presidential election?"
- nl 5mo agoNote that one large factor in this is Anthropic and OpenAI's lobbying to ban large open source models. They frame it as "China is stealing US intellectual property" which plays well in the current environment, but be very clear: it is just an anti-competitive play. To make that very clear, contrast the loud public blog posts about how "Chinese Companies" were using multiple accounts to distill model data, and the complete silence when Elon Musk admitted in court they do the same for Grok. (The side issue that LLM outputs are probably only protected under contract law, not as something that is copyrightable is a distraction here BTW)
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]