WASHINGTON ¨C 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 a first ¡ª 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.

Critics have called the government orders, which came with very little explanation, a de facto licensing scheme.

Toeing the government line, Ratcliffe reiterated that tracking emerging technologies has been his highest priority, ¡°right up there with China,¡± since he took office 18 months ago.

The analogy between cutting-edge AI and nuclear weapons has become increasingly common in recent months in U.S. national security circles, where several think tanks describe a genuine technological ¡°arms race¡± pitting the United States against China and Russia.

The CIA director accused U.S. adversaries of seeking to ¡°to steal and to manipulate America¡¯s advancements for their own ends and gains,¡± touting the agency¡¯s embrace of U.S. technology.

The director detailed a reorganization of the CIA around cybersecurity, describing ¡°a sword¡± and ¡°a shield¡± to defend critical infrastructure, and said he had met with Elon Musk, head of SpaceX, as well as executives from Amazon, Google and Dell.

At the conference, AWS, the world¡¯s largest cloud computing provider, announced a $1 billion credit program for U.S. intelligence agencies and a classified cloud service for American defense contractors.