President Donald Trump points his finger as he signs an executive order on AI next to Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz, R-Texas, left, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington on Dec. 11, 2025.
Al Drago | Reuters
The Trump administration has taken new steps to gain more control over the rollout of future releases of artificial intelligence models by dictating which companies and entities can have access to the latest Frontier models, two people familiar with the matter told CNBC.
Until now, this decision has been in the hands of American AI giants.
Both Anthropocene And OpenAI have decided which companies and agencies have access to their best-performing models, often involving large enterprise customers.
Anthropic introduced its most powerful Mythos cybersecurity model, Project Glasswing, to a handful of partners. OpenAI was asked by the government to protect its recent GPT 5.6 release and has a similar consortium called Daybreak for its cybersecurity model.
A White House official told CNBC that there are no approvals for AI releases from private companies.
The official said that any deployments, tests or meetings with government experts are “voluntary” and that “decisions about the timing and extent of disclosures rest entirely with the companies,” referring CNBC to Trump’s recent executive order.
“The administration continues to work with all American border laboratories to strengthen the security of this technology without hindering innovation,” they wrote.
However, the Trump administration blocked Claude Mythos 5 and Fable 5 last month due to “national security concerns” and reopened access after weeks of intensive negotiations with Anthropic. OpenAI announced last month that it would restrict new AI models to “trusted partners” to comply with government requirements.
The White House is walking a fine line on regulation at a time when sophisticated AI tools pose massive cybersecurity risks and cheaper, open models from China are quickly closing the gap with American border labs.
Chinese startup Moonshot AI introduced its Kimi K3 model on Friday, which largely matched the performance of Fable and GPT-5.6 and even outperformed the US Frontier models in at least one independent benchmark.
David Sacks, founder of Craft Ventures and former White House AI czar, called the Kimi breakthrough “concerning.”
“This is how you lose the AI race,” he wrote. “The rest of the world won’t play by our rules if we mess up.”
The government has already taken several steps in recent months to revamp AI oversight, starting with President Donald Trump’s June executive order that called on companies to voluntarily give the government early access to models for testing.
This week the government launched its own program called Gold Eagle, which aims to work with the private sector to find and fix cyber vulnerabilities.
The so-called clearinghouse would give the White House the task of greenlighting which companies can access new AI models, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss information that is not public.
The government’s moves have called into question the future of company-led initiatives such as Project Glasswing and OpenAI’s Daybreak.
According to one person, these rollouts will require explicit government approval in the future, in which partners can be involved.
— CNBC’s Megan Cassella and Ashley Caroot contributed reporting.
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https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/17/white-house-ai-access-anthropic-openai.html
