The pro-AI movement is splintering over whether national security concerns outweigh the need to keep America's AI companies ahead of Chinese rivals. David Sacks — Trump's former AI and crypto czar — warned that restricting access to America's most advanced AI models risks undercutting the strategy Trump laid out a year ago. The White House asked OpenAI to delay a broad rollout of its latest model, GPT-5.6, which will now be released in stages, following a similar directive that forced Anthropic to suspend access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models. Mythos is back online on a limited basis after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Anthropic's work with the government had "yielded significant progress." "This is how you crash the U.S. AI market," Kevin Bankston, AI governance advisor at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told Ground Level AI. Box CEO Aaron Levie told Axios this is "one of the most important changes in the AI landscape in the past four years." Two separate security evaluations show that Chinese AI systems have already caught up to the best U.S. models on cybersecurity. Open-source Chinese model usage has surged in recent weeks, and Chinese models now occupy several top spots on OpenRouter's usage leaderboard. For investors, this is "hugely bearish," venture capitalist Paul Kedrosky told Axios. Some AI labs have asked for clearer federal rules; Anthropic has urged stronger safeguards as models become