{"id":99999,"date":"2026-07-09T07:34:14","date_gmt":"2026-07-09T07:34:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/99999\/"},"modified":"2026-07-09T07:34:14","modified_gmt":"2026-07-09T07:34:14","slug":"microsofts-brad-smith-on-u-s-ai-policy-regulation-without-transparent-or-complete-rules","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/99999\/","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft\u2019s Brad Smith on U.S. AI policy: \u2018Regulation without transparent or complete rules\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Microsoft<\/a> President Brad Smith has weighed in on U.S. policy on AI, saying that the Trump administration\u2019s current approach lacks transparency and does not provide the clear rules companies need.<\/p>\n

Smith was speaking exclusively to Fortune on the sidelines of the AI for Good Global Summit.<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone is reluctant to say there should be regulation, but what we really have right now is regulation without transparent or complete rules,\u201d he said. \u201cWithout rules, businesses can\u2019t plan.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Trump administration\u2019s recent decisions to restrict access<\/a> to two of the industry\u2019s most advanced AI models has left even the labs building them guessing at what the government\u2019s AI policy is.<\/p>\n

Last month, the Commerce Department invoked<\/a> export-control law to force Anthropic to pull its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models from the market worldwide, citing a cybersecurity risk. Weeks later, officials pressed OpenAI to hold back the public rollout of its new GPT-5.6 model family, limiting early access to government-vetted partners. Both restrictions have since eased: Fable 5 came back online<\/a> earlier this month, and OpenAI said this week GPT-5.6 will launch publicly on Thursday.\u00a0<\/p>\n

While Washington was right to act on a genuine security concern with Anthropic\u2019s Fable, Smith said, and frontier models do need to be assessed before release, the administration is now effectively regulating frontier AI without the tools it needs to do so.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe U.S. government got information that led it to conclude that there was an urgent cybersecurity risk, and when the government gets that information, I think it\u2019s right to act,\u201d Smith said. \u201cBut, what the government found was that it only had one regulatory tool it could use: an export control tool.\u201d<\/p>\n

Legal experts have also noted that the export controls Washington reached for were never designed for widely accessible AI models delivered over an API, raising doubts about whether the government\u2019s recent decision could have survived a legal challenge<\/p>\n

\u201cThe government doesn\u2019t have the tools it needs,\u201d\u00a0 Smith said. \u201cUltimately, common sense says don\u2019t be heavy-handed, but have enough of a touch that you can do what needs to be done. I hope we can move the conversation in that direction.\u201d<\/p>\n

So far, critics have said the administration\u2019s policy looks something like a licensing regime <\/a>built without formal legislation\u2014or even any clearly delineated rules. A June executive order set up<\/a> a voluntary pre-release review process but explicitly avoided a formal licensing system that would have forced developers to secure government approval before releasing new frontier models.<\/p>\n

But, with Anthropic, officials have shown they are willing to reach for another mandatory tool\u2014export controls\u2014when a company declines to cooperate voluntarily or when it feels a company has done something it feels is too risky. OpenAI and Anthropic have also faced two different processes within weeks of each other, with no published standard for either. The government has not disclosed the criteria for who counts as a \u201ctrusted partner\u201d or which models will be subject to vetting in the future.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A call for AI independence<\/p>\n

The government\u2019s use of export controls to block foreign access to Anthropic\u2019s models has caused a political scramble for so-called sovereign AI\u2014the push by governments to control both the models and the infrastructure that AI runs on.<\/p>\n

In Europe in particular, politicians across the continent\u2019s political spectrum said the move highlighted the dangers of relying too heavily on American technology and infrastructure. One French politician likened the shutdown to a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, while a British lawmaker said that hospitals and researchers had lost access to crucial technology overnight.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney made similar remarks<\/a> around the G7 summit, calling it a lesson in over-reliance on a small number of providers.<\/p>\n

But Smith thinks that the export control used against Anthropic has been misread as an effort to cut off foreign users specifically, when the government\u2019s intent was to deprive everyone of access.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThey asked Anthropic to take Fable off the market,\u201d he said. \u201cAnthropic said it would not, so they used an export control lever in a way that caused Anthropic to take it off the market, both domestically and internationally.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Foreign governments say the Anthropic episode shows how exposed they are to U.S. infrastructure, and according to Smith, the onus is now on Washington and American tech firms to prove that access to their systems will be reliable.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe want to sell our services around the world, but people will not buy what we have to sell unless they\u2019re confident that there will be certainty of supply, continuity of supply, and we need to address that,\u201d he said. \u201cThere needs to be a level of technology assurance, both access to markets and access to supply. The two go together.\u201d<\/p>\n

Just hours earlier, Smith\u2019s sentiment was echoed by Salesforce<\/a> CEO Marc Benioff. He told the audience during a fireside chat that he felt \u201cgood\u201d about the government\u2019s decision to block foreign access to Anthropic\u2019s Fable 5 model, adding that Europe had misread the government\u2019s attempt to tackle a valid national security concern as a hostile attempt to cut off foreign access to American tech.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Microsoft President Brad Smith has weighed in on U.S. policy on AI, saying that the Trump administration\u2019s current…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":100000,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,5251,53,25,19459,625,2940,320,157,2819,2942,8090,2187],"class_list":["post-99999","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai","tag-ai","tag-american-politics","tag-anthropic","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-brad-smith","tag-donald-trump","tag-marc-benioff","tag-microsoft","tag-openai","tag-policy","tag-salesforce","tag-tech-regulation","tag-washington"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99999","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99999"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99999\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/100000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}