export-controls

OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol went public on July 9 after a 12-day US government review nobody can fully describe, a preclearance run under an executive order that bans mandatory preclearance in plain text, showing what the frontier-release regime has become on its second use.

While Washington spent June turning frontier model releases into licensed events, Meituan open-sourced LongCat-2.0, a 1.6-trillion-parameter agentic-coding model under an MIT license trained entirely on domestic chips, as the counter-move to the export-control regime.

In eighteen days, Washington turned a model release into a licensed event, as Anthropic's Mythos and Fable 5 went dark on a secret Commerce letter and OpenAI shipped GPT-5.6 only to government-approved partners before the curbs lifted on July 1.

JPMorgan cut Hong Kong staff off from Claude on June 18, weeks after Goldman did the same, over licensing fine print rather than security, which is how a vague export control the courts would never uphold gets enforced anyway: by private compliance teams.

On June 12 a Commerce letter switched off two Anthropic models worldwide, raising an older question of whether software can be export-controlled at all: America tried once, on encryption, and lost in court, and this control fails on the same three layers.