On June 2 the White House issued an order designed to put the government first in line for the most powerful AI ever built.
It sets up a classified benchmarking process, run by the Treasury, Homeland Security, and the War Department through the NSA, to test frontier models for their cyber capabilities and decide which ones cross into a tier the order calls "covered."
It effectively requires the companies building those models to hand them over for 30 days before public release, so the state can study them behind a classified door before anyone outside it gets to touch them.
Which models cross into that tier gets decided by a single person, the Director of the NSA, under criteria that stay classified. Treasury, Homeland Security, and the War Department help build the test and sit in the room when it runs. None of them can overrule him.
The line between a model that is yours and a model the state holds first gets drawn by the head of the country's largest surveillance agency, by a standard no one outside the building is allowed to read.
The NSA is the agency built to break into systems and read what crosses them. Give it a frontier model for a month, alone, with the specific task of charting what that model can do to a network, and you have handed the offensive arm of the state a private demonstration of its next tool.
Government review before release is not new. Since 2024 the major labs have given a civilian safety office inside the Commerce Department an early look at their unreleased models. It ran its tests close to the open and published what it found, and by this spring Google, Microsoft, and xAI had joined the others inside it, more than 40 evaluations deep.
The June 2 order builds its own version of that review and routes it somewhere darker. The early look now runs through the NSA. The standard that decides what qualifies is now classified. One man makes the call, and the findings are sealed.
The printing press, the rifle, the radio, the home computer. Each one reached the public, and the public decided what it was for. The most powerful instrument ever built reaches the NSA first now, by a measure no one outside the agency is allowed to read, and it reaches you second, in whatever condition the early look has left it.
The state simply arrives ahead of you and stays there. That should concern any person who cares about liberty.