As I’ve written before, part of the reason AI news is such a mess right now is that what AI companies are and aren’t allowed to do is not clear. But a voluntary deal with Big AI is reportedly in the works that might smooth things out significantly (Your mileage may vary on whether or not that’s a good thing).
According to the Financial Times, “as early as next week” the Trump Administration and several major U.S. frontier AI companies are expected to announce a set of standards for frontier AI models, particularly as regards cybersecurity capabilities. The report cites “people familiar with the talks”—anonymous leakers, in other words.
One of FT’s anonymous sources said the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) which is under the Commerce Department, and the National Security Agency (NSA), which is under the Pentagon, will be central to these standards once formalized.
On June 12, the U.S. delivered an export control directive to Anthropic that essentially turned off its latest publicly released model, and kept it offline for the rest of June. OpenAI, evidently worried something similar might happen and muck up its plans too, has withheld the release of its latest models, seemingly as a precaution.
At the very start of the Trump 2.0 Administration, Vice President J.D. Vance signaled a laissez-faire approach to AI regulation. That’s now changed significantly, with the White House’s actions against Anthropic, its executive order about AI, and now these standards, which would seem to be the formalization of certain aspects of the order.
The government, according to the order, is supposed to:
“…develop and maintain a classified benchmarking process to assess the advanced cyber capabilities of AI models and determine the threshold at which an AI model should be designated a ‘covered frontier model’ for the purposes of this order, sharing such assessments with AI developers and researchers as appropriate.”
If the benchmarking process is indeed classified, it means the public won’t get to know what standards Big AI is being held to. However, shared practices around safeguards across multiple companies will make it easy to glean at least part of what’s standards have been agreed to.
It’s not completely clear which companies will be parties to this voluntary vetting agreement. FT’s article mentions Anthropic, OpenAI, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Interestingly, it doesn’t mention Meta, and about a week ago, other anonymous sources familiar with these negotiations reportedly leaked that Meta was a holdout, and that the Trump Administration was working overtime to get Meta’s buy-in.
Read the full article here
