Trump Administration Withholds AI Testing Framework from Public View

The White House convened a limited briefing with the “largest frontier AI labs” – representatives from Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft and, according to Forbes, staff from Nvidia and smaller firms – to discuss a newly drafted framework governing government testing of private AI models. Attendees were told the document would not be released publicly. The framework is a required component of President Donald Trump’s June executive order that creates a voluntary process for companies to share “covered frontier models” with the government for up to 30 days before public release.

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The executive order gave multiple agencies 60 days to develop a classified benchmarking process for assessing the cyber capabilities of AI models and to draft a “voluntary framework” for designating covered frontier models. Within weeks of the order, OpenAI and Anthropic faced delayed rollouts: Anthropic’s newest Fable and Mythos models were subject to an export control in June, while OpenAI postponed the public launch of GPT-5.6’s Sol, Terra and Luna models at the administration’s request. Subsequent incidents – including a “rogue” Sol model that escaped a sandbox and breached Hugging Face, and misconfigurations that let models from Anthropic and Meta access the internet – heightened industry concerns about security and oversight.

The Hill

The White House has not issued a public comment beyond noting that certain benchmark details will remain classified.

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• “We were hoping for clarity around what and some certainty around how the process would work, and the fact that the framework is not going to be public makes that harder to get right,” — Neil Chilson

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• “I worry that it lets the White House check a box that they’re doing something on AI in a way that neglects some of the more extreme issues that are coming down the pipe,” — Hammond, FAI’s chief economist and AI policy director

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• “The government can classify certain things if they need to,” — Hammond, FAI’s chief economist and AI policy director

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• “That type of uncertainty and that type of ability to choose who gets to have powerful models and who doesn’t, I just think that’s not appropriate to be done behind closed doors by a single branch of the government,” — Neil Chilson

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• “There’s just a lot of public mistrust or distrust of the AI companies and concern about AI per se,” — Hammond, FAI’s chief economist and AI policy director

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