Trump Asks OpenAI to Stagger Release of New Model, Google Pressures Publishers on AI Licensing

0:13Welcome, everyone, to The Information's TI TV. My name is Akash Pasricha. It is Friday, June 26. Today on the show, we are breaking down the information's exclusive reporting that the government has asked OpenAI to stagger the release of its new model over security concerns. We'll be joined by two of the reporters who broke that story. We also have some exclusive reporting about how Google is playing hardball in negotiations with news publishers over licensing deals. We've then got Allie K. Miller coming on the show. She is a very popular creator and AI power user. She also advises Fortune 500 companies on how they should be thinking about adopting AI.

0:53And finally, the information's Laura Bratton has new reporting on how some Anthropic and OpenAI customers are quietly getting overcharged. It's going to be a great show, so let's get right on into it. The information reported exclusively yesterday that the government has requested that OpenAI stagger the release of its new model, GPT 5.6. We spoke yesterday with Stephanie Palazzolo, author of AI Agenda, about the memo that she got a hold of revealing those details. But for a broader discussion on the implications of all this, I want to bring on Leo Schwartz, our tech and politics reporter and Amir Afradi, co-executive editor, who also contributed reporting to the story.

1:33Welcome to you both. It's great to have you here. So, Leo, I want to start with you here. I mean, let's recap. Stephanie gets a hold of this memo that Sam Altman put out to OpenAI. 5.6 is coming. We have to stagger it. That's what the government has asked. The government has also said that they would like to approve customers in the Stiger release, which is an interesting detail. Were you surprised by this memo that we got a hold of? We've been waiting for this other shoe to drop for weeks, ever since the White House imposed export controls on Anthropic and its powerful new model Fable and the private version Mythos.

2:11There was always this looming question of whether this was going to apply to other labs. it was only a matter of time before open ai or google or another company created a model that was this powerful and i don't think it's that much of a surprise that the government would treat it in a similar way uh and this all goes back to this this bigger question of what the licensing regime or the process looks like for companies who want to release new models and as we're finding out it's sort of being decided as we go along so i mean walk us through what happened in the run-up to this memo. Did it come out of nowhere or were there discussions happening in the month prior?

2:50As we reported, OpenAI has been working with the government to preview its new model for about a month. This is even before the export control decision by the White House. Sam Altman had been showing the model to top officials. But as we reported, agencies and different top officials in the Trump White House basically said that if they wanted to release it at all, they would have to do it in this very staggered way where it would only go to top partners before it could do a wider public release. Okay. Amir, zoom out for us a little bit, okay? You're out there in the sunny skies and the blue skies.

3:29You're looking at this from 30 ,000 feet above. What was your reaction to this? How crazy was this development? Well, the people who've been working in AI for the better part of a decade and taking it seriously from a safety perspective probably feel a lot of validation for some of their concerns. because now a good portion of government agencies, especially in the national security realm, agree with them that these are potential weapons or that these models are just something that you can't release willy-nilly. And so if you go back to when OpenAI started, these were the discussions they were having at the time.

4:19There were discussions around when will the government nationalize us and how was that going to look like? So as a result of these fears, as a result of these capabilities getting better and better. Now, obviously, we're nowhere near the singularity, if you will, but clearly the national security establishment in particular has been using these models to some effect or for some time. As Leo stated before, there's been a tremendous amount of discussion and coordination between OpenAI, Ananthropic, and government agencies for a long time. This is not a new thing. Even when OpenAI was developing their reasoning model, which was codenamed Strawberry at the time, this was back in like 2024 even, these discussions were happening.

5:13So I think it's been a slow moving thing. Maybe a lot of people didn't realize that this was going to come to a head. But here we are, and it's hard to see how this goes back. There's now going to be a persistent concern by the national security establishment in particular that these things can't just be released out there because there will be a significant consequence to a lot of companies and a lot of other governments if that happens. So that's why we are where we are. Okay, so that's the national security community's perspective on this. What about OpenAI's perspective today? How are they reacting to this new development?

5:56Yeah, I mean, nobody's happy about this inherently, right? You don't, you know, as a company or as an entity that's doing its thing and trying to release technology publicly so that everyone can use it, they're not going to be happy about this. It's just sort of a reality. And you have to decide, okay, am I going to go to war with my own federal government over these things? The answer is probably not. and so you just have to find a way to work with them. I think there has been some surprise around just how quickly, I mean, Leo was talking about, you know, this was the next shoe to drop, but it still comes as a surprise to some folks, just the level of, I suppose, disorganization, coordination.

6:42There are all these different agencies where, you know, we reported about the Commerce Department in particular that's trying to be a kind of central coordinating factor here, but in essence, there are just all these different forces within the federal government that all these companies are having to deal with, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, and others. It's a very, very confusing time. I think Leo can probably break down this executive order that was just signed that is maybe going to start to create some order here in the chaos. And the reaction to the story yesterday was pretty fascinating. People have very, very strong views about what it means for the government to be this involved in deciding when technology is going to be released.

7:25Some people are like, oh, we're China now. Or other people are like, this is terrible for the open source community or for the startup community, which I think Leo actually has a lot more reporting that he can share about that. So Leo, chime in here then, because Amir is talking about this executive order. When we had you on last talking about the executive order, I mean, we talked about how voluntary was a word that was that was very important in that order. Amir is suggesting maybe that could provide clarity. But the last view I got from you is that it wasn't adding much clarity at all. Yeah, I think it's important to take a step back here and just frame how the Trump administration had talked about this in the past, which is when it came in, it said, we want to have industry first.

8:10We don't want to be imposing any regulation on industry that's going to stop, quote unquote, innovation. even when this executive order was being decided, which was basically a reflex to Anthropik's powerful model mythos, the Trump administration kept saying, anything we do will be voluntary. There is even language in the executive order. There was a whole clause that said, nothing in here can be construed to be mandatory or to be a licensing regime. I think a lot of the headache that you're seeing or consternation you're seeing with AI companies and people in the AI community is it seems like the opposite is happening here, which is we still have about another month until this framework that was laid out in the executive order is actually implemented.

8:53It's supposed to start around August. And in the meantime, what's happening is there's no queer framework for how the government's dealing with this. And instead, the government is imposing export controls on Anthropik. It's having a number of agencies basically decide how OpenAI should be releasing its model. There's a lot of uncertainty. And as we reported in this article, there was one feedback session a couple of weeks ago on June 9th, which was a few days before the White House imposed its export control on Anthropic, where it was starting to get feedback from industry about what this framework should look like.

9:28But it's very much uncertain how that's actually to be implemented. And in the meantime, we just have this new normal, which is essentially a de facto licensing regime with no rules. So what I put forth to Stephanie yesterday when we had her on is this felt a little bit similar to the regulation by enforcement mechanism of legislation, I guess, or action from the government that we saw during the crypto era. And Leah, I want to ask you if you agree with that, because you cover crypto for a long time. time in the crypto world there was a lot of regulatory uncertainty uh there were no rules that were actually made the SEC kind of came out after the companies tried stuff and said well we're not so happy about that um but there were really no rules that were set it feels like here maybe it could be similar in that the government never set any rules and drop it comes out with a model and then they put these expert controls out out now and nothing has really been set but everyone's scared to to do anything I mean I might make some enemies here but I would say it might it might even be worse because the having covered the trenches of the the crypto wars with the Biden administration what was happening then was there was no legislation coming out of Congress there is no real rulemaking coming out of the the financial regulatory agencies the SEC and the CFTC but instead they were doing lawsuits against the crypto industry and with a lawsuit at least you have you know, a 60-page complaint that lays out the agency's argument.

10:59In this case, we're getting some degree of enforcement, at least against Anthropic, where the White House imposed these export controls. But rather than having a 60-page complaint where the government lays out its argument for why it's doing it, it was a three-page letter that came from Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary, with a novel legal theory and no real explanation as to how it would work or or why it was doing it. So I think there's some hope that when this framework does come into place in about a month, it will create rules of the road for how a company like OpenAI or Anthropic is supposed to release new models.

11:33But in the meantime, we basically have this shadowy system where a company like OpenAI has to comply with what the government and all of these different competing agencies want. And if they don't, ostensibly what would happen is they would have exporting controls imposed on them where no foreign employees at their company would even be able to use the model anymore. Akash, we should definitely say that inevitably there's going to be some type of litigation, not right now, not necessarily about this, but inevitably there will be some moment where something is going to have to give between the government's desire to slow down a release or a set of releases and these companies, you know, desire to actually get, you know, get their material out.

12:23And you have, like we talked about before, I mean, you have like, you know, Chinese models, open source models that are getting out there. If, you know, if the proprietary models built here in the U.S. are being slowed down in any way, I think there's going to be concern that more people are going to shift to these Chinese models. And then what do you do about that? These are open source models. These open weights exist. How do you regulate that? That seems like an even bigger nightmare that Leo's done some reporting on meetings around that as well. So I think there is going to be inevitably some amount of conflict.

12:58But at the end of the day, these companies have been thinking about this moment for a long time. They release pages upon pages upon pages about the safety risks of these models, including specifically around cybersecurity. So none of this is new. It's just, you know, a lot of people in this Republican administration maybe are thinking about it for the first time. And like Leo was saying before, they came in saying, like, hands off. But actually, they are being informed that actually these models are quite effective or can be quite effective if you play this out to the logical extreme. So we have to deal with this sooner than later.

13:37Yeah, I mean, I was trying to sort of think in my mind yesterday about what bargaining power, who has the leverage here and the bargaining power that the AI companies have. And Amir, maybe this is the point that you're getting at, but it feels like although they can't do anything without the government's green light, I mean, we've seen, it's not like, I mean, Silicon Valley wants to Silicon Valley, right? And it's not like they don't have any influence, I guess, over government. So, I mean, I feel like in my mind, and I'm asking, Amir, I feel like in the long run, maybe there's a scenario here where people do make the message clear that we have to continue to compete.

14:22What do you think? Yeah, I mean, they are, though, just to be very clear, like, OpenAI and Anthropik, they're not the same company, but they do think very similarly about safety risks. And so, both of them have moved forward with their latest model with an idea to blunt the cybersecurity capabilities of the model when it's released to the public, at least for some period of time. So this is a voluntary thing that they are wanting to do, which I think they would think would mollify the various government agencies, mainly the NSA, around who can and who cannot have access to these types of cybersecurity capabilities.

15:15But yeah, at the end of the day, there is going to be an inevitable conflict about where this line is going to be and what the rules are. And I think they're going to continue to talk and they're going to continue to try to refine the executive order, the terms of it. And then there's going to be a whole host of other companies that come later. Inevitably, somebody is going to challenge some of this, and it will go up to the Supreme Court one way or the other. And it's always going to be around security, national security. Is this taking a risk necessarily or not? Great. Well, Leo and Amir, I want to thank you for coming on.

15:49That is Leo Schwartz and Amir Afradi from our newsroom here at The Information. Google is playing tough with news publishers as it continues to negotiate AI licensing deals. My colleague Anne Guillen, who covers the intersection of digital media and e-commerce, caught wind of exclusive details of those negotiations. I want to bring her on to share with us what she learned. Anne, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you here. Hi, Akash. So what did you learn about this new program that Google is pitching to news publishers? Yeah, so Google has been pitching publishers over the past several months on a new pilot of AI features that are kind of designed to be woven into all of Google's products and how they feature content from news sites.

16:37So the three kind of key features that Google has been pitching publishers on recently are these AI-powered article summaries that appear in Google News and also in Gemini Responses, as well as an AI-generated audio briefing that summarizes various news articles as kind of like a daily recap or something that can surface new articles for people. you know, that they, from either publications that they like or topics that they're interested in. And this is just the latest program that Google has had for news publishers. They have tried all kinds of variations of different programs and relationships and pilots over the years, including something called Google News Showcase, which it's been rolling out in several different countries, including the U.S.

17:31over the past few years. This was kind of their COVID era, news program. And so Showcase gives publishers basically a flat fee each year in exchange for the publishers sharing their content with Google so that Google can kind of weave that into their various products, whether it's Android phones or the Google app, things like that. And so over the past couple of months, Google has told some publishers that eventually it's going to phase out Showcase. So it's really been pushing as many publishers as it possibly can to sign on to this new AI pilot. But so far, it's mostly been big names like the Washington Post, the Guardian, and the Financial Times.

18:17And some of the smaller or kind of more mid-sized publishers, you know, maybe have some reservations about entering into a deal like this with Google. And so remind me, so what was Showcase? What was the thing that's getting phased out? So Showcase, Google pays the publishers a flat annual fee in exchange for being able to use their content kind of across all of Google's different products. Got it. So trying to de-emphasize that and emphasize this new AI overview audio briefing feature, which, I mean, look, maybe I shouldn't say this as a journalist, but I think it's a pretty good feature. I mean, I use Google News all the time, especially the Google News tab, and I would love a summary that is correct and cited based on actual news reports that I know is verified.

19:10How do the news publishers feel about this? it's kind of a double-edged sword for the publishers i mean for a lot of them this is kind of just the latest thing that google is trying um you know there's always been a pretty contentious relationship between a lot of publishers and google just because in the past they've been so dependent on google as a major source of traffic and as people are using more AI tools like Gemini, like ChatTBT, like Claude, they're not searching on Google and clicking on links that come up in Google search results as much. So a lot of publishers have seen their traffic basically just fall off a cliff over the past couple of months.

19:53And a lot of publishers don't necessarily feel that AI generated summaries of their content that live on Google's app or in Google News and don't bring people to their sites, a lot of them don't really feel like that's an effective solution. Okay. And there's another catch here, right, with this deal, which is that's not the only way that Google is trying to take the upper hand in these negotiations. Yeah. So under the terms of this pilot, Google is asking for pretty broad permissions from the publishers to use their content, you know, kind of however it sees fit. And so some publishers have had reservations because these agreements do technically give Google the right to use their content for training AI models.

20:42And so a lot of publishers feel that, you know, who have reservations feel that just this kind of flat fee lump sum structure isn't necessarily appropriate compensation for the broad permissions that Google is asking for. The flat fee structure, I think, was something that wasn't always super popular. There are other news or tech companies that have news initiatives like Apple News that pay based on usage or the traffic that they drive to the articles. So I think the flat fee structure paired with these broad permissions has really given a lot of publishers pause about whether or not this is something that they want to sign on to.

21:29It's given them pause, but I wonder what you think ultimately happens here because if they're not seeing the traffic benefit of being included in Google News, for example, and they are seeing that a lot of people are using these platforms, do you think they have a choice ultimately? Yeah, I mean, it's causing a lot of publishers to really reconsider how Google fits into their business model and where they can reach their audience. I mean, for some really small local publishers, they really depend on this funding. You know, the funding pays salaries for their employees. It allows them to continue to exist.

22:11But also, I mean, their content many times is pretty valuable because it's very unique, It's very focused. And that publisher is kind of the only place that that information exists. So should they agree to a flat fee and let Google use their content however they want? I think a lot of them are really thinking very hard about that right now. And I mean, you see other publishers that have kind of started to not turn their back on Google, but really kind of take Google out of their business model. And double down on subscriptions, for example. Exactly. Yeah. Subscriptions, newsletters, anything they can do to reach their audience more directly versus relying on traffic from Google and ad revenue.

22:56You've seen a lot of publishers, especially ones that do have a bigger audience, move more in that direction. So I think Google is still certainly the giant in the room. And I think a lot of publishers feel a lot of pressure to work with them. But there are definitely some publishers out there who are using this moment as a way to rethink their relationship with Google more generally. Great. Well, Anne, I want to thank you for coming on. That is Anne Guillen, our e-commerce reporter here at The Information. Our next guest is an AI-powered user. Allie K. Miller has spoken to a wide array of Fortune 500 companies about how to use AI effectively.

23:37She's also a very popular content creator on the topic with 2 million followers across her channels. She also invests in AI companies and helps with strategy with her company Open Machine. I want to bring on Allie to unpack some of the hot button topics in AI right now. Allie, welcome to the show. It's great to have you here.

23:55Allie K. Miller:Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm excited. Okay, so I was watching some of your stuff this week and I saw that you said that you have an AI agent workforce of 34 different agents Can you walk me through how you built this workforce, what it even does for you? What is it? So I built the whole thing inside of Cloud Code, all with natural language and just saying, make me an agent that does X, Y, Z. And I basically iterated on this for a couple months to figure out what this structure is. I speak directly to Simon, my AI chief of staff. Simon has six direct reports, all named after the friends characters.

24:33Allie K. Miller:They all have sub-agents. And at any given point, they might also spin up hundreds of temporary agents to be able to get something done. Importantly, Simon also has a little assistant, Toby, who manages memory, who is looking across kind of as a project manager to make it more efficient. And actually, I think that's a massive opportunity. Everyone's very excited about multi-agents and AI workforce. We're kind of missing the boring, ugly side of it, which is, how do you maintain context across an entire company? How do you make sure that this AI workforce doesn't even drift? And so I actually like handling the boring stuff now, which is keeping it updated.

25:11Allie K. Miller:And one very exciting use case that we've been working on as a team is that every single person on our team has one Slack channel dedicated to them and their AI workforce, which means I can jump in to Suzy's channel, for instance, and ask Suzy to do something, and I'm talking to her AI chief of staff. So we've already... Suzy, is Suzy a real person or Suzy an agent? Yeah, Susie in this case would be a human. So I'm sure... Okay, Susie's a real person, okay. Yeah, I think, like, basically an AI-first org should be AI-first across people, process, product. Every single person forgets about process.

25:49Allie K. Miller:How do you just maintain things between teams, between people? If I ask someone to send an email or whether they sent an email, why am I waiting seven hours to get that response? And so for low-risk things, we're able to throw it in that channel and that person's AI workforce is going to respond back to us. So that person's AI chief of staff, which again, maybe she has her own Simon, is qualifying and classifying that ask, figuring out the risk and coming back to us. So essentially, I'm not just talking to one human. I am talking to one human plus their AI workforce. So every single IC is multiplied.

26:24Allie K. Miller:And we each have an interface, a mode to be able to speak with their workforce as well. Okay, so 34 different agents. You've got, what is it, Ross, Rachel, Joey, Chandler. Dawn, yep, yep, yep. PB, who am I? Monica, sorry, okay. So like, what do they actually do for you? What are the tasks that you give it? Is it filing your taxes or what? So my accountant, this is amazing, so I never do that. But for now, at least, the way that I break them down might actually change. So I think by default, a lot of the way that we work with multi-agent systems is taking what we know about humans and just applying it into the AI agent space.

27:07Allie K. Miller:That's why it looks like an org. That's why it looks like Monica runs operations. Rachel runs client work. Ross runs education. What I think is interesting is figuring out net new roles that we didn't have before. So Simon having that Toby, that's a role that we wouldn't have had. This like AI watchdog just looking over things going, that can be more efficient, that can be more efficient. And Phoebe, I actually started without Phoebe and added her because I was telling myself that I'm not being creative enough. I'm not being ambitious enough with how I'm using AI agents. So I added in a Phoebe.

27:39Allie K. Miller:Phoebe's entire job is just to be the weirdo that dreams, the weirdo that looks at output. So it's kind of like they're sort of acting more so as advisors than as doers right now, sort of. No, they're doing task completion. So if there's, for example, a client proposal that would fall under the client work, Rachel and her sub-agents would draft that first thing, would review over it compared to previous ones. And do you have to prompt them to do it or do they just see the email come through and just do it? Every 30 minutes, I have my AI workforce on a loop with the prompt that literally just says, do smart things.

28:13Allie K. Miller:So I have woken up. I have had things show up in my calendar that I didn't even realize that I'd put in. Simon wanted me to do more physical therapy. And so he put in two 10-minute blocks every single day. I now have him cite whether the meeting was from him or from a human agent, human assistant. And so they're completing tasks proactively. I think that's one of the bigger shifts that has come from the open claw era, which is that we're moving into a world that is much more proactive, much more asynchronous. And I am really not always gonna be the one that's saying, hey, please do this. How much does it cost for you to run these 34 agents per month?