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The US Government's AI Export Control Dilemma Last Friday, citing unspecified national security concerns, the White House ordered Anthropic to restrict the export of its powerful AI models Fable and Mythos to anyone outside of the United States, as well as foreign nationals inside the country. Shortly after, the AI giant hastily pulled the plug on both models, which have now been unavailable to anyone for a week. The Event Details: A History of Export Control Challenges The episode is the first real test of whether the U.S. government can use export controls to contain frontier AI the way it has tried, with very uneven results, to contain encryption and spyware before it. And dramatic as it may sound, how this standoff gets resolved could shape not just Anthropic’s access to foreign markets but the rulebook that other AI labs will have to build around. The Data Analysis: Past Precedents for Export Controls The U.S. government was behind what is perhaps history’s most spectacular failure of this approach in the early to mid-1990s with the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption technology. The Wassenaar Arrangement, an international treaty that limits the export of dual-use software and technologies, has had limited success in curbing the export of spyware. The Impact Analysis: Challenges in Regulating Dual-Use Cyber Technologies Given the past experiences that world governments have had with trying to control the reach of software, government-mandated export controls are unlikely to be the right approach to stop malicious actors from abusing powerful dual-use cyber technologies. The Prediction: Future Implications for AI Export Controls There is a reasonable chance the administration will buckle and lift the restriction in the interest of keeping American AI companies competitive worldwide — a move that would amount to tacit acknowledgment that AI labs elsewhere, including in China, will likely reach similar capabilities regardless of what the U.S. restricts.