On Monday, The New York Times reported that the White House was considering having the government review AI models before release. To the casual Verge reader, it appeared to be a total reversal in Donald Trump’s policies. For the past year, he had been a vocal champion of pro-industry deregulation, repealing former President Joe Biden’s massive executive order on AI safety, lifting export controls on advanced chips, and signing executive orders that would have legally punished states for passing and enforcing AI laws in the vacuum of federal legislation. Now, the Trump administration has seemingly pulled a 180, demanding federal oversight and vetting of pre-market models.

But to Washington, the shift in the White House’s policy was due to three major changes. First, Anthropic’s Mythos has genuinely spooked the national security apparatus, forcing the administration to confront a new threat: the possibility of adversaries using American AI models to attack America’s public and private sectors. Second, other countries are now beginning to lay out their own AI regulations, potentially in a manner that would go against the interests of the United States. (And yes, “destroying a Big Tech data center in a targeted drone strike” is a manner of government AI regulation, but we’ll get to that shortly.)

And third, David Sacks was pushed out of his job as the AI and crypto czar, giving Silicon Valley one less mechanism to pitch an industry-friendly, “innovation-at-all-costs” agenda to Trump himself.

The definition of political influence can be squishy and amorphous, especially around Donald Trump, who will pick up anyone’s calls and then act on that advice if he feels like it. (Remember when Laura Loomer had control over the National Security Council?) But what’s legally certain is that Sacks, the billionaire venture capitalist and Trump fundraiser in 2024, no longer has the privileges available to him as a special government employee, such as the ability to review sensitive information, to speak on behalf of the White House, or to hold official influence over government employees and agencies.