Trump promised to bring order to AI oversight. That lasted 2 weeks.

“It’s clear that there has been a vibe shift in the Trump administration on AI, and the priorities have somewhat apparently shifted to first and foremost taking down Anthropic,” said Adam Thierer, a senior technology and innovation fellow at the libertarian R Street Institute.

“We don’t want to have a situation where politically unfavored actors or their models are all of a sudden finding themselves late on a Friday afternoon, having to pull models off the global market to satisfy the demands of certain people in an administration,” Thierer said. He added that the executive order “was supposed to bring some order to the situation, but it’s clear that it really has not done that.”

Like several people interviewed for this article, Thierer said it was now clear that the government’s proposal to vet advanced AI models was “not voluntary at all.” And others said the forced takedown of Fable strongly suggests the government will require new AI systems to be licensed by the government — even if the executive order says otherwise.