America Is Improvising Its Way Through AI Governance | American Enterprise Institute– www.aei.org

The last few weeks should end any illusion that the United States can improvise its way through frontier AI policy. What we have witnessed was not serious governance. It was vibe policymaking: ad hoc, deal-by-deal reactions with no clear standard, public explanation, or predictable process. The result was not just confusion. It exposed a deeper weakness: the United States has no reliable way to measure frontier AI risk, no agreed process for acting on it, and no institution built to do either.

In early June, Anthropic released Mythos 5 and its restricted consumer version, Fable 5, models that write complex code and find software vulnerabilities with minimal prompting. Days later, the Administration ordered Anthropic to cut off access to all foreign nationals, effective immediately. Unable to verify nationality in real time, Anthropic pulled the models entirely. OpenAI, meanwhile, held back its own GPT-5.6 series at the government’s request.