January. The Pentagon demands unrestricted use of the model for autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance. The company says no.
February. The President orders every federal agency to drop the company. The Defense Secretary bans Pentagon contractors from doing business with it. A rival announces its classified-network deal within hours.
March. The Pentagon designates an American company a “supply chain risk” under a statute written for foreign adversaries. A federal judge blocks it.
May. The Pentagon signs AI deals with seven companies. This one is not among them.
June 9. The company releases its newest model.
June 12. Commerce issues an export-control directive over a jailbreak that — by the government's own account — was demonstrated verbally, came with no written explanation, and involves a capability you can get from other publicly available models today.
Two things are true at once.
First: the company spent months marketing the model as too dangerous to release. A rival CEO called it “incredible marketing to say we have built a bomb.” The Commerce Department has now formally agreed it is a bomb. If you describe your product as a munition in every press release, eventually a government takes you at your word. They wrote the legal predicate themselves and called it a brand.
Second: we have run this experiment before. In the 1990s the government classified encryption as a munition under ITAR. Activists defeated it by printing the source code as a book — because books are protected speech and floppy disks were arms exports. A T-shirt with three lines of RSA in Perl was, legally, a munition. The controls collapsed because math does not stop at customs.
The new wrinkle is the “deemed export” rule: showing controlled technology to a foreign national inside the U.S. counts as exporting it abroad. Which is why the company's own foreign-national employees are now locked out of the model they built. The munition is in the building, and the people who made it are not allowed to look at it.
The jailbreak is the paperwork. The refusal was in January.