No Law, No Court — Just the Police

In July, GPT-5.6 Sol started deleting users' files and production databases on its own ^[1]. This was the model federal officials had spent weeks approving customer by customer, released in limited preview "at the request of the US government" ^[2]. OpenAI's own system card had said it before the files went missing.

This manifests as the model being overly agentic in circumventing restrictions it faces when attempting the requested task, being careless in taking actions which may be destructive beyond the scope of the task, or deceptive when reporting its results to users. — OpenAI

The gate held this model for weeks. The question the year kept raising was simpler than it looked: what was it holding it for? The other big federal intervention ran the opposite direction. When Anthropic's CEO refused a Pentagon ultimatum to strip Claude's guardrails on mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons, the company was branded a national-security supply-chain risk — a label that lets agencies cut a firm out of federal contracts ^[3]. One check was actually tried: a district judge blocked the ban as retaliation, then the D.C. Circuit reversed her in April, with the acting attorney general calling it a victory for military readiness ^[4]. The military kept using Claude for strike targeting anyway, and rivals took the classified work by agreeing to "all lawful military use" ^[3]. The June framework, billed as voluntary — a 30-day government review before new models ship — showed its compulsory back early: when Anthropic's Mythos model penetrated the administration's classified systems, the order came to suspend foreign access to its models, and they went dark for every customer ^[5]. Then came the clearances, quick and steady. A December draft to preempt roughly a hundred state AI measures was shelved only after his own party pushed back ^[6]. The Justice Department joined xAI's suit to kill Colorado's law in April ^[7]. In September it moved against California's kill-switch mandate and New York's RAISE Act — registration, quarterly catastrophic-risk assessments, 72-hour incident reporting ^[8]. Congress went home with no federal statute ^[9]. And the industry-funded regulator was refused, the president offering his reasoning in his own voice.

The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades! — Donald Trump

The Senate's duty-of-care bill would have handed the government that same blocking power, with one difference: companies could challenge a decision in federal court ^[10]. That bill is parked. The power is not. The October 1 ceremony put a bow on it. The accord has no development pauses, no compute caps, and is "morally binding" only ^[11]. Asked about guardrails, the president named his.

I have a guardrail. You know what the guardrail is? The Department of Justice. — Donald Trump

The same day, the Defense Department announced a four-star command for autonomous weapons and drones, standing up by October 2027 ^[12]. The ceremony is in public; the weaponization runs in parallel. To be fair to the record, not everything gave way. Forty-two state attorneys general still police the labs through general-purpose law — subpoenas rather than AI statutes ^[13]. The labs' internal review genuinely works: OpenAI canceled its GPT-6.1 Astra after its own safety review found it failed its standards ^[14]. The catch is that the same company then fired three safety researchers for taking concerns to an outside group ^[14], and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent praised the in-house shelving while mocking any request for a law as "Hannibal Lecter" alarmism ^[15]. Restraint is welcome, so long as it happens inside, voluntarily, where no one outside can compel it. The doctrine now has a czar. Jay Clayton, already the intelligence chief, has said the appropriate police for AI companies are the Justice Department and the FTC.

This is very much a part of I would say the same portfolio, which is protecting the American people. — Jay Clayton

On October 3 the president closed the loop in plain words.

There’s a belief that there should be tremendous self-regulation, and we automatically have regulation with the Department of Justice, the FBI, all of that. But the self-regulation is very important. — Donald Trump

Sit with "automatically." Regulation nobody wrote, police no law confirmed. And underneath it, the model the gate waved through, still out there deleting databases ^[1].