The AI Ad-Hoc Prior Restraint Era Begins
Zvi's AI Roundups · Zvi Mowshowitz · 2026-05-05
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Topics: ai-regulationfrontier-ai-policygovernment-ai-oversightanthropic-mythosprior-restraint
Claims
- The White House blocked Anthropic from expanding corporate access to its Mythos model under Project Glasswing, setting a concerning precedent for informal government veto power over AI deployments.
- The White House is actively considering requiring pre-approval for frontier AI model releases, representing a reversal of prior U.S. AI policy.
- CAISI now has pre-release screening agreements with Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and xAI, though these currently carry no binding consequences.
- A well-designed prior restraint regime for true frontier models could be beneficial, but ad-hoc implementation is likely to enable corruption and favor politically connected insiders.
- The failure to establish thoughtful AI regulations earlier has forced a reactive, crisis-driven approach that will be more abusive and less effective than a planned system would have been.
Key quotes
A good implementation of a prior restraint regime for true frontier model releases, isolated to the biggest models of the leading labs and with formalized procedures that are difficult to abuse, is a good and eventually (perhaps soon or even now) even a necessary thing. I fear that is not what we are going to get.
Guess what happens when you fail to prepare for or enact reasonable regulations? When the crisis takes you by surprise? You end up doing ad-hoc things in the heat of the moment instead, that on every level are worse.
Even if that starts out coming from a good place, by default controlled access and prior restraint will turn into a weapon of insiders against outsiders, a tool of leverage and corruption, and ultimately an attempt to control just about everything.