CIA Director John Ratcliffe on Tuesday compared the capabilities of the most advanced artificial intelligence models to nuclear weapons in a tacit defense of the Trump administration’s latest hardline to control the release of more powerful AI technology.
“In conversations with many of the president’s other advisers on national security and economic security, we’re talking about the impact of these frontier models of AI,” Ratcliffe said during a speech at the AWS Summit in Washington.
“It wouldn’t be wrong to refer to their capabilities as akin to digital nukes,” Ratcliffe said.
On June 12, Washington forced Anthropic, a leading US AI firm based in San Francisco, to cut off access to its two most powerful models, the Mythos 5 and Fable 5, by placing an export control on them.
A government-enforced recall of a frontier model — a first — was only partially lifted on Friday for the Mythos, now accessible to a limited circle of US partners, while the Fable 5, its limited-edition version for consumers, remains offline.
OpenAI, Anthropic’s US rival, launched its GPT-5.6 model on the same day with very limited access, agreeing for the first time to allow the US government to verify authorized partners on a client-by-client basis.
Critics have called the government orders, which came with very little explanation, a de facto licensing scheme.
Toeing the government’s line, Ratcliffe reiterated that tracking emerging technologies has been his highest priority, “right up there with China”, since he took office eighteen months ago.
The analogy between cutting-edge artificial intelligence and nuclear weapons has become increasingly common in recent months in US national security circles, with some think tanks describing a veritable technological “arms race” pitting the United States against China and Russia.
The CIA director accused US adversaries of trying to “steal and manipulate America’s advances for their own purposes and benefits”, touting the agency’s embrace of American technology.
The director detailed a reorganization of the CIA around cybersecurity, describing “a sword” and “a shield” to protect critical infrastructure, and said he had met with Elon Musk, the head of SpaceX, as well as executives from Amazon, Google and Dell.
At the conference, AWS, the world’s largest provider of cloud computing, announced a $1 billion credit program for US intelligence agencies and a classified cloud service for US defense contractors.
