Publications: Michelle Lopes Maldonado

The temporary shutdown of Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5 highlighted the uncertainty surrounding the government's authority to restrict access to frontier AI models and the costs that uncertainty can impose on innovation and trust. To provide greater clarity for developers, customers, and allies, Congress should establish a transparent statutory framework for AI shutdown authority with clear standards and proportionate safeguards.

Adversarial AI distillation poses a growing threat to U.S. AI leadership and national security, and Congress is right to address it through the Deterring American AI Model Theft Act (DAAMTA). But before passing the bill, lawmakers should narrow its scope, strengthen evidentiary standards, protect legitimate research, and pair it with technical safeguards and international cooperation to better combat large-scale AI model theft without hindering innovation.

Adversarial AI distillation poses a growing threat to U.S. technological leadership, national security, and AI safety by enabling foreign actors to extract the capabilities of frontier models without authorization. Policymakers should strengthen legal and technical defenses against industrial-scale model theft while ensuring any response preserves legitimate AI research, innovation, and the responsible use of distillation.

Regulatory interventions should be calibrated to the nature and magnitude of the harm they address, should not restrict beneficial uses of AI in pursuit of harms that existing law already addresses, and should preserve the open information environment that has underpinned both technological innovation and European cultural production

Unlike training-data disputes, CNN's lawsuit against Perplexity alleges near-verbatim reproduction of its journalism through AI search products. Policymakers should favor targeted enforcement—not sweeping AI restrictions.