If the administration panics at every AI advance, it doesn’t have a policy

Only a couple of months after the Trump administration outlined a light-touch, innovation-friendly stance to artificial intelligence in its national framework proposal, it now appears to be backing down from that stance. And what replaced that optimism about the future of AI has been, by some accounts, infighting within the administration over how to deal with AI going forward. Representing one-half of the fight is a push by some officials to regulate AI more aggressively. 

It was a disorienting pivot. Some Trump officials even stated they would like the White House to regulate AI “like an FDA drug.”

What gives? The administration seems to have been spooked by the release of advanced capability AI models, such as Claude Mythos and ChatGPT-5.5-Cyber, which can quickly and cheaply scan thousands of lines of code to find and exploit vulnerabilities in software programs. These models can more efficiently identify software weaknesses, enabling even an amateur cybercriminal