THE CLAIM. Executive Order 14409 creates no 'mandatory governmental licensing, preclearance, or permitting requirement' for AI models. THE CHECK: that line is verbatim and accurate. But the order also tasked the NSA, CISA, and NIST with a classified threshold for which models count as 'covered frontier models,' due by August 1. As of this issue, 31 days later, there is no Federal Register notice, no NIST or CISA publication, and no OSTP statement, though the administration reportedly walked roughly 100 organizations through the finished framework privately on August 4. THE TWIST: nobody has to comply, except the eligibility criteria for those roughly 100 organizations are unpublished, there's no appeal path has been publicly described, and the government is also the largest federal buyer of the AI these labs sell.