DANA NICKEL and MAGGIE MILLER, Politico; ‘It’s a hurricane warning’: Guardrails around powerful AI models may be too late
The U.S. has at most six to 12 months before Beijing can compete with this new wave of hyper-advanced AI models.
"The U.S. is scrambling to strengthen guardrails around increasingly powerful artificial intelligence models before China can catch up.
It may already be running out of time.
New AI models, such as Anthropic’s Claude Mythos and OpenAI’s GPT 5.5-Cyber, have advanced faster than legislation regulating the technology can keep pace. They have both shown a remarkable ability to identify software vulnerabilities and launch cyberattacks — skills that hackers and cyber adversaries are hungry to exploit.
Recent estimates suggest that the U.S. has at most six to 12 months before Beijing gains access to a frontier model with prowess comparable to Mythos or GPT 5.5-Cyber or develops an AI competitor that could eventually be wielded as a cyber weapon...
This race to develop defensive tools against a potential barrage of AI-powered cyberattacks has been accelerated by accusations that China is stealing U.S. technologies to create copycat versions of advanced AI models via distillation attacks, by which attackers use a “teacher” model’s outputs to train their own “student” models...
As this watershed moment for AI fast approaches, the U.S. government is weighing how to support the continued development of American-made technology while balancing the need for greater guardrails.
The Trump administration has largely taken a hands-off approach to regulating the release of frontier models to avoid stifling innovation and to stay competitive with China. It was finally motivated to act after Anthropic warned that the rate of AI progress threatened to upend global economies, public safety and national security if not deployed safely.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order earlier this week that encourages AI companies to submit their powerful new models for voluntary government review at least 30 days before releasing them to the public."
