AI Policy as a National Security Issue
The most significant factor currently shaping global AI policy is AI's real and projected national security risks. We are entering an AI-driven state of exception | Edition #301
What the past few days have shown is that, from now on, the most significant factor shaping AI policy in the United States and beyond will be AI's real and projected national security risks.
Every other concern will be sidelined, postponed, or seen as minor when compared to the risk of an adversarial nation using AI to hack a country's power grid or invade a sensitive national database.
When AI policy is treated as a national security issue, anything can happen at any time, exceptionally, unexpectedly, and aggressively.
We can therefore expect AI policy measures to remain reactive, unpredictable, and often seen as draconian.
Especially in the U.S., given the high stakes of the AI race, AI policy will embody a never-before-seen, newly emerging, AI-driven state of exception.
Bookmark this post, as you will enjoy coming back to it later, when global AI policy, and especially U.S. AI policy, becomes unrecognizable to the eyes of many.
Let me recap some of the events that have led to where we are today:
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Mythos and the beginning of the shift
The main AI policy shift started with the launch of Mythos, Anthropic's new AI model, particularly capable at computer security tasks.
Anthropic wrote that during testing, Mythos Preview could identify and exploit vulnerabilities in every major operating system and every major web browser when directed to do so, including finding a 27-year-old bug in an operating system known primarily for its security.
The company decided not to release the model to the public, making it available only to selected partners in Project Glasswing (recently expanded to include over 150 organizations in 15 countries).
Three days ago, on June 23, a U.S. official stated that during a testing exercise, Mythos had identified vulnerabilities in highly sensitive and supposedly secure U.S. government computer systems.
So Anthropic’s call not to launch the model was probably right.
Reacting to the launch of Mythos, on June 2, President Trump signed an Executive Order on AI, titled “Promoting Advanced Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Security.”
One of the focuses of this Executive Order was to promote a voluntary framework for frontier AI developers to engage with the government before releasing “covered frontier models” to help protect the United States’ critical infrastructure, cyber defense capabilities, and national security, primarily against external attacks.
Three days after the Executive Order, on June 5, the White House released yet another document: a memorandum to accelerate the use of AI by the U.S. military.
This is also an indirect reaction to Mythos, but from the government’s military wing: if we are reaching new stakes in AI model capability, the U.S. military must be “all in” and quickly catch up.
The memorandum established various measures to accelerate AI adoption by the U.S. military, explicitly stating that no company should interfere with how the military uses AI, including by disabling, degrading, or modifying its AI models, without the federal administration’s approval.
In my article from three weeks ago, I called these major AI policy shifts the “adolescence” of AI policy.
I described it as a series of uncoordinated, reactive, erratic, and aggressive measures in response to a sharp, accelerated, and uncontrollable (but predictable) rise in AI capabilities and risks.
The adolescence of AI policy I described just three weeks ago continues to unfold right in front of us, at an accelerated pace.
Let's take a look at what happened in the past few days.
U.S. AI policy's new normal
One week after the U.S. Executive Order, on June 9, Anthropic released Claude Fable 5. According to Anthropic, Fable 5 is a Mythos-class model that they made safe for general use.
Just three days after the initial release, and citing national security concerns, the U.S. government issued an export control directive suspending all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the U.S., including foreign nationals working at Anthropic.
Anthropic then disabled Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all customers.
There is now a lawsuit against the Trump Administration arguing that the government lacked legal authority to force Anthropic to shut down Fable 5 and Mythos 5, and that this action contradicts the June 2 Executive Order, which explicitly rejected mandatory government licensing of frontier AI models.
Three days ago, according to The New York Times, the U.S. government began pressuring Meta to submit its AI models for “voluntary” review.
Yesterday, on June 25, the Trump Administration appeared to ask OpenAI to delay the release of GPT-5.6 due to security concerns, and said that the government would approve access to GPT-5.6 on a customer-by-customer basis.
Many people working in AI policy have not yet noticed this because these developments unfolded at an extremely rapid pace and contradict the White House's previous stances on AI, but a new normal for U.S. AI policy has emerged.
This new normal seems to be inspired by a state of exception, the feeling that things can get out of control fast and at any time, so action must be quick, effective, decisive, and immediate.
AI is now seen as too dangerous for the public to play with, so the U.S. government has become the de facto entity deciding which models the public will have access to, when, and how.
As the U.S. remains the global leader in frontier AI models, the U.S. government is also the entity that de facto decides which models most of the world will have access to, when, and how, for both civil and military use.
It also decides which countries are partners, and which are not, and what types of special access and benefits partner countries get in AI.
Three days ago, the U.S. announced that the European Union had joined “Pax Silica,” a U.S.-led alliance to counter China’s dominance in AI.
About this initiative, whose name translates literally as “Silicon Peace,” the Under Secretary for Economic Affairs wrote:
“If the 20th century ran on oil and steel, the 21st century runs on compute and the minerals that feed it. This historic declaration hails a new economic security consensus ensuring aligned partners build the AI ecosystem of tomorrow—from energy and critical minerals to high-end manufacturing and models.”
China is not mentioned once, but of course, it is not invited, as Pax Silica was built to counter it in the AI race.
Talking about China, two days ago in Davos, China's Premier said that the speed of technological progress is unprecedented and that there could be a risk of losing control, adding that:
“If governance in this area fails to keep pace, there could be serious consequences.”
We are in an AI-driven state of exception, in which every new AI release will be treated as a potential national security threat, triggering swift AI policy measures.
The field will be more unpredictable than ever in the coming months. We better get ready for that.
This is also why open-source models just went from a technical preference to a political necessity. If every frontier release gets treated as a potential national security event and access is allocated by the sovereign, then open-source is the only development path that doesn't require permission from the entity declaring the exception. The state of exception makes open-source existentially important for everyone outside the circle of trusted partners, which is most of the world.
And we've already seen the response. The US restricted access to frontier models and China released GLM-5.2 under MIT licence with no regional restrictions two days later. The exception didn't contain the capability. It handed the open-source narrative to a geopolitical competitor who now gets to position itself as the one offering the thing America just locked away. The longer the exception runs without exit conditions, the stronger the incentive for every excluded country and every excluded lab to build outside the system entirely. The state of exception doesn't prevent proliferation. It determines who proliferates and under whose rules, and right now the answer is: not America's.
"State of exception" is the most precise framing anyone has applied to AI governance this year and most people won't recognise the weight of what it means. Carl Schmitt defined the sovereign as "he who decides on the exception." The normal rules apply until someone declares them suspended, and the act of suspension is what reveals who actually holds the power. That's what happened. The US had an AI policy framework built on open development, voluntary commitments, and safety standards. Then a model was classified as a national security threat, and the framework wasn't reformed. It was suspended. Export controls, access restrictions, model seizure. The entity that declared the exception became the sovereign over AI development, not through legislation but through the act of declaring it.
States of exception have a specific property that makes this more than an academic observation: they're supposed to be temporary and they never are. The Patriot Act was a response to a specific threat and it's still in force twenty-five years later. Emergency economic powers declared for one crisis get renewed into the next. The conditions for ending the exception are never defined at the moment it's declared, because defining them would limit the power the exception just created. Nobody has specified what would need to be true for the normal AI framework to resume. No capability threshold. No safety benchmark. No sunset clause. Which means the government's role as gatekeeper isn't a temporary response to a threat. It's the new permanent architecture of AI governance, installed without a vote, without a debate, and without anyone asking the one question that determines whether this is a policy or a power grab: when does the exception end?