Microsoft President Brad Smith delivered a sharp critique of the Trump administration's artificial intelligence policy, stating that current government actions amount to regulation without clear, transparent rules. Speaking on the sidelines of the AI for Good Global Summit, Smith highlighted the recent confusion stirred by Washington's haphazard intervention in the private AI sector.
“Everyone is reluctant to say there should be regulation, but what we really have right now is regulation without transparent or complete rules. Without rules, businesses can’t plan,” Smith said.
The administration's recent moves to force Anthropic to pull its advanced models from the market and to pressure OpenAI into delaying its GPT-5.6 rollout were executed using blunt export-control law. Smith acknowledged the government had a genuine cybersecurity concern regarding Anthropic's Fable 5 model and was right to act. However, he noted officials found themselves with only an export-control tool, a mechanism never designed for software models delivered via API. Legal experts have questioned whether such a maneuver would survive a court challenge.
The White House has avoided a formal licensing system, instead relying on a June executive order for voluntary pre-release reviews and, when voluntary cooperation fails, mandatory export controls. The criteria for which models are vetted and who qualifies as a governmental “trusted partner” remain unpublished, leaving American developers guessing at the rules of the road.
Sovereign AI Fallout
The heavy-handed action has sparked international jitters, with European and Canadian officials citing the shutdown as proof of the danger of over-reliance on American technology. Smith argued the export control was misread abroad as an intentional cut-off, but the damage to U.S. commercial primacy was done. The episode underscores the need for the U.S. to define a transparent process that protects national security while ensuring domestic tech firms can maintain their global market lead without being undercut by the government they pay taxes to support.