Dawn of the "national security" tier of AI

Mitchell_Porter
Tue, 05 May 2026 09:40:50 GMT

Today the New York Times put out a story called "White House Considers Vetting A.I. Models Before They Are Released". I'm sure that tomorrow @Zvi will put out some expert commentary. For now, here are my amateur thoughts.

The story says that Claude Mythos's widely reported hacking capabilities are the immediate cause. Apparently we have reached the limits even of Trump 2.0's tolerance for the growth of AI power in private hands. If the private companies involved in Operation Glasswing have access to more hacking power than the NSA, what would even be the point of having deep-state hackers?

So it looks to me as if, above the battle for consumer and enterprise markets that has lately become identified with OpenAI and Anthropic respectively, there is also going to be a "national security" tier of AI; and any AI above a certain level of "general intelligence" will probably be placed on that tier. This may involve a kind of nationalization, in which all the frontier companies involved enter into de-facto public-private partnerships with the US government.

Since it's national security, there may also be a significant role here for Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, maybe Palmer Luckey, and the "Middle Earth" cluster of companies like Palantir and Anduril - but especially Palantir, whose public profile has been rising because of the ICE deportation campaign and the recent war with Iran. (Palantir CEO Alex Karp also coauthored a book last year, The Technological Republic, which tries to articulate a political philosophy for the AI age.)

Palantir doesn't produce frontier AI models, but it aims to organize data for its military, intelligence, and law enforcement customers. Most likely it has proprietary frameworks that encapsulate how those customers use the actual models like Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok. One may therefore expect it to be a big player in this political process - and let's also remember that US vice president J.D. Vance was mentored by Thiel.

On the other hand, Elon Musk associate David Sacks seems to be out as AI czar, though he'll still be part of PCAST, an advisory council on science and technology. That may leave Marc Andreessen associate Sriram Krishnan as the main single advisor to the White House regarding AI.

Given this administration's very close ties to Israel, I will also state my suspicion that Ilya Sutskever's company Safe Superintelligence Inc, which has a research hub in Tel Aviv, serves as Israel's most important window into frontier AI (perhaps Google DeepMind has a similar role for the UK), and would necessarily have some relationship to any oversight process that was instituted.

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