But on Friday, the White House moved to limit access to Anthropic’s Fable after Amazon CEO Andy Jassy raised concerns that users could bypass the model’s guardrails, according to two administration officials and a White House official granted anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the episode.

Anthropic said the move forced it to disable the product with virtually no notice — triggering waves of anxiety across the AI sector, as lobbyists and industry advocates struggled to square the administration’s action with the order’s promise of an approach free of overbearing regulation.

“We don’t want to have a situation where politically unfavored actors or their models are all of a sudden finding themselves late on a Friday afternoon, having to pull models off the global market to satisfy the demands of certain people in an administration,” Thierer said. He added that the executive order “was supposed to bring some order to the situation, but it’s clear that it really has not done that.”

Like several people interviewed for this article, Thierer said it was now clear that the government’s proposal to vet advanced AI models was “not voluntary at all.” And others said the forced takedown of Fable strongly suggests the government will require new AI systems to be licensed by the government — even if the executive order says otherwise.