Anthropic + AE Studio publish "modular pretraining" for gating dual-use model capabilities (GRAM)

A Spotlight paper at ICML 2026 ("Modular Pretraining Enables Access Control," 2026-07-08) from AE Studio in collaboration with Anthropic introduces GRAM (Gradient-Routed Auxiliary Modules): during pretraining, specialized knowledge (e.g. virology, cybersecurity) is routed into small removable modules so one trained model can be reconfigured to turn those capabilities on or off at inference. Anthropic states GRAM has not been applied to any production model and may never be.

What it means Early research, not a shipping feature: it points toward a future where specific model capabilities can be switched off without retraining, but it is a lab result explicitly not in any production Claude today — nothing to adopt yet.