Approval Required: The Week the U.S. Started Deciding Who Gets the Best AI
By Ervin Dhima
In late June 2026 the most capable AI models stopped being something you could simply buy. OpenAI began releasing GPT-5.6 only to a government-vetted list of partners, days after Washington suspended foreign access to Anthropic's top models. It isn't a kill switch — it's a permission layer, and it changes who controls the frontier.