A U.S. crackdown on one of America's leading AI developers may be handing an advantage to China, according to reporting from CNBC and Tom's Hardware.
The Trump administration has moved against Anthropic's top models, including a ban on Fable 5. According to CNBC, that crackdown "is looking like a gift to China," opening the door for Chinese model makers to close the gap with U.S. firms.
The gap is closing fast. According to Tom's Hardware, within a week of Fable's ban, GLM-5.2 — an openly available model from the Chinese firm Z.ai — had climbed to the top of the open-weight leaderboards. Tom's Hardware notes that Z.ai is a blacklisted company and that GLM-5.2 runs on Huawei silicon rather than U.S. chips, a sign that Chinese developers are building competitive systems on a domestic hardware stack.
The story sits against a backdrop of diverging policy at home and abroad. CNBC reports the White House is also crafting an executive order aimed at thwarting state-level AI laws, a move that would centralize policy and override the patchwork of rules that states and localities have been writing, as documented by analysts at Brookings. Other policy outlets, from the Carnegie Endowment to White & Case and Thomson Reuters, are tracking how the U.S., EU, U.K., China and Switzerland are each charting separate regulatory paths, with some researchers urging the U.K. to avoid an EU-style framework and others arguing AI needs more regulation, not less.
Why it matters: AI leadership is increasingly a contest between national policy choices, and the early signs suggest that restricting a top U.S. developer can accelerate rivals abroad rather than slow them — a trade-off regulators will have to weigh as the rules take shape.