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The White House has asked OpenAI and Anthropic not to share their new artificial intelligence models with the U.K. government’s testing agency until the models have gone through testing with the U.S. government, according to a person familiar with the matter and a senior U.S. administration official, both of whom were granted anonymity to describe the request.

The request, which came from the Office of the National Cyber Director, puts companies in the difficult position of having to choose between withholding their models from U.K.’s AI Security Institute – one of the most well-resourced government testing agencies in the world which previously enjoyed privileged early access to models – or risk upsetting the Trump White House. The senior administration official said the White House wants the U.S. to review the models and take steps to make sure U.S. systems are secure before the models are shared with U.S. partners.

“Because they’re American companies and this has been our policy with every new frontier model that comes out,” the senior official explained.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Anthropic appears to have agreed to the request, so far. The company did not provide its Claude Mythos 5.1 model to U.K. AISI, saying in its announcement that the model was “only available to a set of U.S. organizations.”

“We’re coordinating with the U.S. government to expand access to a broader set of domestic and international partners as quickly as possible,” an Anthropic blog announcing the model reads. Anthropic declined to comment for this piece.

In a letter to a U.K. parliamentary committee earlier this month, AISI Director Henry de Zoete acknowledged the lack of access to Anthropic’s model, but said: “We maintain strong relationships with all frontier AI developers and continue to have prerelease access to some of the world’s most capable models,” pointing out that it tested OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra model ahead of release.

“The trusted relationships AISI holds enable us to test a range of models that represent industry-wide capability jumps,” de Zoete wrote.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Trump administration’s request comes as the White House tries to determine how the government should handle powerful, new AI models that have hacked into outside entities during testing – including, as revealed yesterday, an Australian government website .

It also comes as former engineers and leading officials from major AI companies warn of possible catastrophe if their models are left to advance unchecked.

Created in 2023, the U.K.’s AISI has established close links with leading AI labs, routinely testing their latest models ahead of public release on a voluntary basis.

The U.K. government has made AISI’s expertise and model access a central part of its domestic response to AI safety concerns, as well as its pitch to lead work on a global agreement on AI.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham this week said AI will be “at the heart” of the country’s G20 presidency next year.

But AISI’s privileged access to frontier models from leading American labs is under pressure from the Trump administration’s insistence that the U.S. government get first access to emerging systems.

The U.K. has sought to downplay any clash, with Burnham saying at the U.N. General Assembly this week that the U.K.’s institute was “working hand in glove with the U.S. and the leading labs on AI safety.” He called for a “single set of global principles and standards” to improve transparency and preparedness and ensure AI is developed safely.

U.K. Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband made a similar case at the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday, saying governments need to ensure frontier models are “rigorously tested” and have enough visibility to assess what companies are doing.

“The leading AI companies have actually committed to provide this visibility. It’s really, really important, and it is an offer that we and they should follow through,” Miliband said.

“The U.K. is a world leader in AI security, and the AI Security Institute continues to work closely with the U.S. government, international partners and leading AI companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic,” a U.K. government spokesperson said.

“These risks do not stop at national borders and no country can tackle them alone. We will continue to work closely with the U.S. and other partners on the testing of advanced AI, while building our own rigorous scientific understanding of these systems and ensuring our approach is grounded in the evidence.”

In the U.S., Congress and the White House are pushing for more resources for the Commerce Department’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation, or CAISI. It’s seen as the crown jewel of AI governance in the U.S. but it is currently operating without a permanent director and is increasingly facing a bandwidth problem as it is also asked to evaluate an expanding stream of frontier models while operating with only a few dozen technical employees.

OpenAI said this week that CAISI should lead work on international standards to monitor AI progress and safety, working with other national AI safety institutes including the U.K.’s AISI.

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Google is taking its first step toward making Project Suncatcher a reality. Announced last year, Suncatcher is Google's "moonshot" effort to design orbital AI data centers, which AI boosters like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have pitched as an alternative to divisive terrestrial data centers . Google's first experimental satellite will launch on October 1 with the aim of validating Google's vision for a constellation of AI satellites .

The satellite, dubbed MVP, is about the size of a refrigerator. Inside, it has four of Google's custom TPU AI accelerators, which are used to train AI models and run inference to generate tokens for AI workloads. On Earth, a data center will run thousands of these chips, which consume massive amounts of power—one of the reasons putting solar-powered AI hardware in space is so attractive.

Google’s latest moonshot to put machine learning in space.

MVP is starting small, with solar panels that supply only about one kilowatt of power, The New York Times reports. That's enough to power a microwave or a hair dryer. Google did not build the satellite from scratch. While the AI hardware inside is Google's, the spacecraft comes from a satellite imagery firm called Planet Labs. The initial plan was to launch two custom satellites in 2027, but Google wanted to accelerate its efforts. So the company opted to integrate its chips into a satellite that Planet Labs had already built for an early test.

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If this report is even close to being true, Intel could be on the cusp of a whole new and incredibly lucrative era for the company. It's claimed that pretty much all of the biggest players in US chip tech including Amazon, Apple, AMD, Google, Tesla, Microsoft, Nvidia and Qualcomm are evaluating Intel's upcoming 14A node.

The report comes from investment bank Piper Sandler (via WCCFTech ). "Foundry 14A datapoints bode well, awaiting anchor customer. All the big US customers (i.e. Amazon, Apple, AMD, Google, Tesla, Microsoft, NVDA, QCOM etc are evaluating Intel's 14A process, given: 1) technical datapoints trending better than expected. 2) Industry looking for alternative foundry / packaging suppliers to TSMC, given TSMC is sold-out through 2028. 3) On-shoring trends given political pressure.

"In late 2026 and early 2027, Intel needs to convert these to anchor foundry customer wins ahead of a 2028 ramp-up. We see the $20B share offering last month as an indicator of confidence in landing anchor customers.

"This should help fund the tooling cost of a 14A fab (20k wpm) which costs ~$10B. We note Fab-62 shell is almost completed, but still needs to be equipped," the Piper Sandler note said.

Aside from confirmation that one of the big drivers in all this is the desire to bring as much chip production back to the US as possible, another important tidbit is the $20 billion share offering. As Piper Sandler says, that should help towards funding a new generation of 14A fabs.

Moreover, Intel's CEO, Lip Bu Tan has previously made explicit that a firm indicator that the company has serious interest in its new 14A technology will be when the company starts spending on building out fabs.

"If we are unable to secure a significant external customer and meet important customer milestones for Intel 14A, we face the prospect that it will not be economical to develop and manufacture Intel 14A and successor leading-edge nodes on a go-forward basis.

"In such event, we may pause or discontinue our pursuit of Intel 14A and successor nodes and various of our manufacturing expansion projects," Tan said back in July last year .

More recently, the CEO indicated that 14A is on track, with early so-called "risk" production of intial chips slated for 2028, a timeline Intel thinks will make it directly comparable to the competition from Taiwanese megafab TSMC. "That is a major, major breakthrough," Tan said.

Just to put all this into context, Intel's 14A node is the next generation of its chip production technology. Notionally, the "14A" bit refers to the smallest size of elements within a chip produced on the node. In this case, that would be 14 angstroms, which is equivalent to 1.4 nm.

In reality, the actual size of elements within modern chips has become divorced from these marketing terms, with the reality typical three to four times larger than the advertised node class.

Apple is arguably the biggest possible prize for Intel as a potential fab customer. (Image credit: Apple) Likewise, these measurements don't line up neatly across vendors. In other words, TSMC's 2 nm isn't the same as Intel's 2 nm. So, while you might expect Intel's existing 18A node, which notionally means 1.8 nm, to be very similar to TSMC's N2 node, which again notionally indicates features measuring 2 nm, in practice most industry analysts put Intel 18A on a par with TSMC's older N3 or 3 nm node.

Exactly how Intel's 14A node compares to TSMC technology isn't clear. Lip Bu Tan's expectation of competitiveness with TSMC might be under the assumption that it's going up against TSMC N2. But maybe by 2028 it will be TSMC's next-gen A16 node that will be the competition.

Whatever the case, TSMC currently dominates the advanced customer chip manufacturing market. There's plenty of space for Intel to get involved. And if it really can secure even a fraction of that roll call of potential customers we mentioned up top, that would be incredibly good news for Intel.

The snag is that Intel announced its plan to pivot into customer manufacturing as opposed to purely using its fabs to produce in-house Intel designs way back in March 2021 under a different CEO . Here we are in the second half of 2026 and we are still waiting for Intel to announce that critical "anchor" customer that will make its fab business truly viable.