The pro-AI movement is splintering over a defining question: whether national security concerns outweigh the need to keep America's AI companies ahead of Chinese rivals.

Why it matters: The fight is happening in public, in real time, and could reshape the way the administration regulates the world's most powerful technology.

Catch up quick: 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 just a year ago.

• "A year ago, President Trump declared that America was in a global AI race and that the way to win it was to be pro-innovation," Sacks wrote on X. "President Trump was exactly right. We deviate from that strategy at our peril."
• The response comes after 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," in a letter seen by Axios. Fable 5 could return soon.

What they're saying: "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.

• This is "one of the most important changes in the AI landscape in the past four years," Box CEO Aaron Levie told Axios.
• "We've been on this very rapid treadmill of constant leapfrogging of model capabilities between labs," Levie argued, adding that competitive pressure has helped drive AI's rapid progress.

Between the lines: U.S. labs could face a government-imposed speed limit while Chinese rivals do not.

• Two separate security evaluations show that Chinese AI systems have already caught up to the best U.S. models on cybersecurity, Axios' Sam Sabin reports.
• Open-source Chinese model usage has surged in recent weeks amid a focus on minimizing AI usage costs, as seen on OpenRouter. Chinese models now occupy several top spots on OpenRouter's usage leaderboard.

Follow the money: For investors, this is "hugely bearish," Paul Kedrosky, a venture capitalist, told Axios via text.

• "The AI party now has a hall monitor who is also diluting the punch. That causes, as the capital markets kids say, re-rating pressure," he said.
• Translation: Investors may assign lower valuations to AI labs if their most valuable products face government-controlled deployment delays.

Yes, but: Some AI labs have asked for clearer federal rules.

• Anthropic has urged stronger safeguards as models become more capable.
• "The government being involved here is actually super important. They just need to find the right balance between safety and broad access," Dan Shipper, CEO of AI subscription service Every, tells Axios.

Zoom in: Investors and executives said they want rules, not ad hoc access decisions.

• Mark Pincus, Zynga founder and investor in both OpenAI and Anthropic, tells Axios he supports clear regulation, but "it's hard to build when there's a moving target."
• Regulation needs benchmarks. Siméon Campos, an AI startup founder, told Axios via direct message that the AI labs could try and "game" those benchmarks to get around regulation.

The bottom line: Frontier AI access is becoming too valuable to leave to opaque government discretion — especially if the winners are chosen before the rules are clear.

An AI-powered forensic investigations firm says its platform was used as part of the FBI's urgent investigation into the attempted assassination at this year's White House Correspondents' Dinner.

Why it matters: Law enforcement agencies are turning to AI tools to sift through the growing volumes of digital evidence generated in criminal investigations.

Driving the news: In this case, digital forensics company Exterro told Axios the FBI used its platform in the frenzied 48 hours between the incident and charges being filed against Cole Tomas Allen.

• Exterro couldn't share how exactly the bureau used its tool, but executives told Axios that customers often use it to dig through messages on seized devices, social media accounts and other digital trails tied to a case. The FBI declined to comment.
• The Justice Department previously said investigators reviewed seized devices, cloud and email accounts, travel and financial records, and surveillance footage and metadata from the Washington Hilton, where the dinner took place.

How it works: Exterro's FTK Suite — which the company said the FBI used — provides an on-premises platform that lets investigators organize evidence from a case in a single repository that authorized users can access simultaneously.

• The platform is primarily designed to help investigators process and organize large volumes of digital evidence after it has been collected.
• Users can query the platform's embedded AI assistant with prompts like "Find all pictures of dogs" or "Show me images and videos where this suspect shows up," according to a demo presented to Axios.
• Investigators can also ask questions such as, "Was this particular person at this location at this date and time?"

Yes, but: Exterro says it does not train its AI models on customer data and that investigators remain responsible for reviewing evidence and making charging decisions.

Keep reading.

MeetingTV, an online videoconferencing and webinar startup, is suing Palo Alto Networks and recently acquired threat-intelligence firm Koi Security over a security research report that linked its infrastructure to a Chinese hacking operation.

Why it matters: MeetingTV alleges that a hallucinated finding is behind the mix-up — raising questions about how companies are using AI in threat intelligence and who bears responsibility for the impact of security research.

State of play: MeetingTV filed a complaint against Koi Security on March 18, alleging the company falsely labeled its websites as infrastructure tied to a Chinese hacking operation in a report published on Dec. 30.

Keep reading.

• SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son is dubious that data centers in space are as promising as some, including Elon Musk, believe. (WSJ)
• Fortune has a worthy read on Jacob Andreou, the 33-year-old former Snap executive who has assumed a larger role in Microsoft's efforts to build AI tools for business.
• Brazil has been leaning heavily on AI to help it scout future soccer talent. (NYT)

CatchCat is an app that lets you collect the cats you see in the real world, much as one collects Pokémon in Pokémon Go's virtual world.