The Government Is Now So Scared of AI It's Begging for a Seat at the Table

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The White House held a “productive” meeting with Anthropic last week. That word—productive—is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

When government officials describe a meeting with an AI company as productive, what they’re really saying is: “We need this thing, but we’re terrified of it, so we’re hoping to make a deal before it breaks something important.” This isn’t collaboration. It’s leverage.

The trigger was Claude Mythos, Anthropic’s new AI model. According to reports, U.S. officials believe Mythos is so critical for national security that the government essentially can’t afford not to have access to it. But here’s the problem: Mythos can outperform humans at certain hacking and cybersecurity tasks. The financial world is spooked. Regulators are nervous. And Anthropic, being a private company with a business model, isn’t exactly in the mood to hand over their crown jewel to Washington without getting something out of it.

This is the moment we should’ve all seen coming, but somehow it still feels like a shock.

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When Your AI Gets Too Good to Ignore

Back in 2019, when GPT-2 was released, OpenAI made a big show of being cautious about its power. They released it gradually, talked about risks, played the responsible AI company. It was good PR and also probably genuine concern. But that was before anyone could prove that AI systems could do economically valuable work that justifies their existence.

Fast forward to now. AI companies have gone from “here’s an interesting chatbot” to “here’s a system that can help break into your bank’s security infrastructure.” That’s not a feature you can keep quiet about. It’s not something you can slow-roll to the market. It’s strategically critical.

The White House meeting signals that the U.S. government has internalized something uncomfortable: they’re not regulating AI from a position of control anymore. They’re negotiating from a position of dependence.

Think about what that means. The same government that spent decades dominating AI research and defense contracting is now in a room with a four-year-old startup asking—politely—if they can please have access to the new model. And not as a customer. As a stakeholder. As someone who matters to national security.

The Real Threat Isn’t the AI (It’s What We’ll Do With It)

Here’s what I actually think is happening: the government is terrified that a different government—or a different actor—will get to Mythos first or will use it more aggressively than the U.S. is willing to.

That’s not a new fear, but it’s newly urgent. When nuclear weapons were being developed, there was at least a theoretical monopoly window. The U.S. built it first, kept the secrets as long as possible, then others caught up. But AI isn’t weaponizable in the same way. You can’t hide it in a bunker. You distribute it. You run it on cloud servers. You sell access to it or release it or get hacked.

This is why the Mythos meeting matters more than the headline suggests. It’s the government essentially admitting: “We can’t outlaw this. We can’t prevent other people from building it. So we need to be friends with whoever builds the best version.”

That’s a dramatic inversion of how U.S. tech policy has worked for the last 70 years.

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Meanwhile, Everyone Else Is Building Walls (And Failing)

While the government negotiates with Anthropic, other institutions are trying older playbooks that probably won’t work.

Tinder and Zoom are rolling out iris-scanning “proof of humanity” checks to stop fake AI accounts and scams. It’s clever in theory. It’s useless in practice. Not because the technology is bad, but because the problem compounds too fast. Fake accounts exist to exploit human behavior, and human behavior is remarkably flexible. You scan an iris, you verify someone’s real—and then what? They use that real account to run a scam, and you’re back where you started. You’ve just added friction without solving the actual incentive problem.

In the UK, the government is seriously considering banning under-16s from social media entirely. Prime Minister Starmer told tech bosses that “things can’t go on like this with online safety.” Again, this is a government realizing that old tools don’t work. You can’t moderate your way out of this. You can’t fact-check your way out of this. The only option left is prohibition.

My read: these are signs of institutional panic, not evidence of solutions.

The IPO Wave Is the Real Story

Here’s what nobody’s talking about enough: Cerebras filed to go public. So did Anthropic, SpaceX, and OpenAI is preparing to list. This isn’t just capital formation. This is the entire AI infrastructure layer attempting to become public companies at the same time.

When a venture-backed AI chip maker goes public, it signals that the VC market believes these companies are mature enough to be owned by public markets. But it also means the growth curve has to keep curving up. Public shareholders don’t wait. They want earnings. They want revenue. They want proof that last year’s hype translates to next year’s profit.

That pressure will reshape how these companies behave toward regulators, toward users, and toward each other. The White House meeting with Anthropic wasn’t just about Mythos. It was about establishing that Anthropic—about to be a public company—is a strategic partner, not a rogue actor.

Government plus IPO capital plus AI capability equals consolidation. We’re about to watch the winners crystallize.

The Fake Avatar Army Nobody Wants to Talk About

Hundreds of fake AI-generated influencers surged onto TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube recently, targeting conservative voters with synthetic political content. This got buried under other headlines, which is exactly what makes it significant.

This is the first coordinated mass deployment of AI synthetic media for political manipulation that we can actually point to and name. It’s not theoretical. It’s not a warning about future risks. It happened. The platforms found it. And the response was… what? Removal? A warning? A reckoning?

No. We moved on.

That tells you everything about our actual readiness for this moment. We can detect these attacks, but we can’t prevent them at scale, and we can’t coordinate fast enough to make removal meaningful before the damage is done. Hundreds of fake accounts reaching millions of people, and our response is administrative cleanup.

I genuinely don’t know if this trend accelerates or if people get better at spotting AI-generated faces. Ask me in six months.

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What I’m Watching

Anthropic’s IPO timing and valuation. If they price above $50 billion, the market is saying “AI infrastructure is worth more than most countries.” That bet will shape every regulatory negotiation that follows. The White House meeting wasn’t a favor to Anthropic. It was the government buying in early.

The METR chart and whether it keeps going up. METR’s nonprofit measure of AI development has become an industry obsession. If that curve flattens in the next 12 months, it means we’ve hit some real constraint—compute, data, or just the limits of scaling. If it keeps climbing exponentially, we haven’t seen anything yet. Watch that number like it’s a stock ticker.

Whether Mythos capabilities leak or get replicated. The financial industry’s fear about Mythos isn’t that it exists. It’s that Anthropic can’t keep it contained. If a competitor builds something comparable in the next two years, the entire premise of the White House meeting—that Mythos is too critical not to have on speed dial—evaporates. Then we’re back to pure regulation, which means the government loses its negotiating position entirely.

Iris-scanning adoption on dating apps and video platforms. This is the tell for whether consumers actually care about verification or whether they just want frictionless convenience. If adoption is below 30% within six months, the tech fails not because it doesn’t work, but because nobody wants to use it.