CIA chief compares cutting-edge AI to nuclear weapons

CIA Director John Ratcliffe speaks during a news conference in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House in Washington on April 6. | REUTERS WASHINGTON - CIA Director John Ratcliffe on Tuesday compared the capabilities of the most advanced artificial intelligence models to nuclear weapons in a tacit defense of Washington's recent hard line on controlling the release of the most powerful AI technology. "In conversations with many of the president's other national security and economic security advisors, we're talking about the impact of these frontier AI models," Ratcliffe said during a speech at the AWS summit in Washington. "It would be ... not misplaced to refer to their capabilities as akin to digital nuclear weapons," he said. On June 12, U.S. President Donald Trump's administration forced Anthropic, a leading American AI firm based in San Francisco, to cut off access to its two most powerful models, Mythos 5 and Fable 5, by imposing an export control on them. The forced withdrawal of a frontier model by a government -- a first -- was only partially lifted on Friday for Mythos, now accessible to a restricted circle of U.S. partners, while Fable 5, its restricted consumer version, remains offline. OpenAI, Anthropic's American rival, launched its GPT-5.6 model the same day with very limited access, agreeing for the first time to let the U.S. government vet authorized partners on a client-by-client basis.