The real fallout from the Trump administration's AI access 'kill switch,' according to legal and policy experts
Weeks after Washington forced Anthropic to pull Mythos and Fable offline and pushed OpenAI to stagger its own release, experts say the improvised approach is doing lasting damage.
For the past two weeks, the Trump administration has held what amounts to a shutoff valve over access to Anthropic's most powerful AI models, Mythos 5 and Fable 5, as well as OpenAI's rollout of GPT-5.6. According to legal and policy experts, that control isn't just reshaping who trusts American AI and creating a reliability nightmare for users and builders — it's also opening the door for China's open-weights models to fill the gap.
“I do think this is turning into an ad-hoc approval regime, and all the uproar on social media is correct,” Saif Khan, a fellow at the Institute for Progress think tank and a former director for technology and national security at the National Security Council, told me. “US models are now at risk of being shut off anytime for opaque reasons. The best open models, which can’t be shut off, are Chinese.”
Trump administration invoked export control law
The mechanism behind that risk, legal experts say, was never built for this moment. The Trump administration invoked export control law — the same legal framework built to keep hardware and weapons technology out of adversaries' hands — to force Mythos and Fable offline, citing national security concerns.
In the most recent updates to this saga, OpenAI was purportedly told by the US government to stagger its own GPT-5.6 rollout. But Mythos returned Friday for more than 100 vetted companies, and Fable is rumored to follow.
The problem, said Kevin Wolf, a partner at law firm Akin Gump and former senior commerce department official who helped craft export control measures during the Obama administration, is that the legal mechanism used to justify these moves is "completely made up."
Normally, he told me, export controls govern the export, re-export, and transfer of hardware, software, and technology. “Models are not exported, models are not released to foreign persons, what’s released is the output of the model, the [model] weights are not being given,” he explained. “There isn’t anything in the regulations or the statute that enables that, authorizes that, contemplates that.”
But the export controls were the closest thing the government could find to address their “policy anxiety” around resolving concerns about the safety of Anthropic’s models. “It appears that the companies and the government are going along with it to try to resolve it outside this public view, but none of this is traditional export control, it’s not traditional anything. It’s an area of law and policy that is still evolving.”
The US is no longer a ‘trustworthy supplier’
Meanwhile, the “kill switch,” as Wolf described it, is having negative effects.
“We’re no longer a trustworthy supplier,” he said, adding that while he does not deny the underlying security issues, “this chaos is a function of the absence of a coherent policy on the topic within the administration.”
Kevin Bankston, senior advisor on AI governance at the Center for Democracy and Technology and author of Converger, put it more bluntly: “This is how you crash the US AI market,” he said. “American frontier model economics won’t be sustainable with a small gated customer base for very long, especially as more customers switch to free Chinese open source models.” By making access to US services unreliable, he continued, the Trump administration “is prompting every customer to consider alternatives, and highly capable open source Chinese models are the obvious backup choice.”
That creates an opportunity for China to spread its soft power, said Adam Thierer, a senior fellow at center-right think tank R Street Institute, who testified in 2025 before House lawmakers about the threat of Chinese AI models like DeepSeek to U.S. national security. Similar to how Trump’s tariffs may have had the unintended effect of driving US allies into the arms of China for their technology needs, these moves “clearly have ramifications for American soft power globally,” he told me. “If a nation undermines trust in its firms and markets, it will suffer major consequences over time.”
Fable is set to return, but the damage is done
According to Axios, the Trump administration is close to allowing Anthropic to restore access to Fable, as soon as this week. But experts say the damage has been done.
“Outside of any sort of regulatory structure, or statutory structure, or policy analysis, the government is going through and making case by case ad hoc decisions,” said Wolf. “By what standards, under what authority, I don’t think anybody actually knows.”
A better policy, said Khan, would be risk management and developing standards for safeguards — which, he added, had been pursued a couple of years ago but dropped in Trump’s second term.
“I think there are lighter-touch types of regulation that are less innovation-chilling and less susceptible to politics and corruption, that avoid the government picking winners and losers,” he said.