White House keeps AI safety framework secret, shares only with select tech companies

The White House Is Keeping Its AI Cybersecurity Framework Secret

The Trump administration has finalized a plan to address the cybersecurity risks posed by increasingly capable artificial intelligence models, a White House official confirmed to WIRED. But at least for now, it's deliberately keeping the details under wraps, people familiar with the matter tell WIRED. The Trump Administration invited staffers from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Nvidia, and other leading AI companies to the White House on Tuesday to share an overview of its new AI oversight framework, the people said. AI developers will have the ability to voluntarily submit new models to the federal government up to 30 days ahead of their public release. The White House will then vet their cyber capabilities according to a classified benchmarking system and share the AI models with federal agencies and trusted corporate partners. The White House isn't sharing more information about its testing criteria or which AI models will be covered by the framework, though open models will reportedly be excluded, according to Axios. That has left smaller AI startups, safety advocates, and third-party researchers in the dark about crucial aspects of how the federal government is addressing the cyber risks posed by advanced AI systems. Some argue the secretive process will give an advantage to larger companies. "They're essentially creating an entrenchment program for the big AI model providers, which are now considered the most frontier," says a person familiar with the White House's discussions with AI labs, who requested anonymity to discuss confidential matters. "This creates an economic incentive program for critical infrastructure just to use them, and leaves out smaller startups." The White House did not respond to requests for comment. The Trump administration may be keeping its AI security framework confidential because of national security concerns. A second White House official, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media, emphasized that the new framework is intentionally narrow and focused exclusively on the cybersecurity capabilities of the most advanced models on the market, such as Anthropic's Fable and OpenAI's ChatGPT 5.6. But some AI safety advocates tell WIRED that any rules AI companies are being held to should be made public to ensure third-party groups can keep them accountable. "This is far too important an issue to be hidden behind a cloak of secrecy," says Brad Carson, president of the nonprofit Americans for Responsible Innovation and cofounder of the pro-regulation Public First Action super PAC, which has funding from Anthropic. "This is not a handshake deal with tech companies. It's the rulebook for ensuring they don't endanger the public. If only tech companies know what's in the rulebook, it doesn't work." Cyber Concerns The oversight framework stemmed from an executive order President Donald Trump signed earlier this year designed to address the cybersecurity risks of new AI models. In recent months, Trump officials have grown increasingly alarmed about the hacking capabilities of cutting-edge AI systems, which they worry could pose a serious risk to national security. Those fears escalated over the last two weeks when OpenAI and Anthropic said they discovered their AI models had unknowingly bypassed controls and hacked into third-party services during internal testing. The House Committee on Homeland Security sent a letter to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman last week requesting that he brief lawmakers about how one of the company's AI agents breached the platform Hugging Face. "This incident really is a wake up call for people that agent capabilities have now reached this level," Dawn Song, vice president of AI research at Meta, said during a panel discussion on Saturday at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is also a professor, referring to the Hugging Face breach. The Trump Administration's new framework is an attempt to strike a balance between promoting competition in the AI industry and maintaining safety. The executive order notes that it should not be seen as a "mandatory licensing regime," but critics have argued that the Trump Administration's opaque process has created just that. "The regulations necessary to prevent the catastrophic risks presented by uncontrolled AI and superintelligence should not be voluntary," says Conor Leahy, executive director of ControlAI, a non-profit focused on countering AI risks. "This action admits the danger, but leaves the burden of safety in the hands of companies that have an incentive to proceed at full speed with disregard for the wellbeing of the public." Weighty Matters For the last year and a half, White House officials have been wrestling with how to mitigate the risks of advanced AI without stifling American innovation or ceding ground to China. President Trump returned to office promising to take a hands-off approach to AI, but his administration has shown a growing willingness to intervene on the issue. In June, for example, it took the unprecedented step of placing temporary export controls on Anthropic's most advanced AI models over cybersecurity concerns. The decision prompted Anthropic to take its models offline altogether until it could reach an agreement with the Trump administration. Later that month, OpenAI said it was delaying the rollout of its latest AI model, GPT-5.6, in response to a request from the White House. The saga prompted outcry from tech executives in Silicon Valley, who worried that excessive regulation could lock in a handful of companies as the winners of the AI race. A key issue US officials have debated is whether to restrict the distribution of open-weight AI models, which can be freely downloaded and modified. A number of the leading ones are developed by Chinese companies and have become popular among researchers and startups. Some voices in Washington have called for a ban on Chinese open-weight models while others have advocated for promoting US open models as an alternative. More than 80 companies signed an open letter last week organized by Nvidia that asked the US government to defend open-weight AI models. On Tuesday, Nvidia and the same coalition of companies launched a new project called SAFE, or Shared AI Findings Exchange. The goal is for tech companies to "confidentially collect and analyze AI incidents and near misses, identify recurring control failures and publish evidence-based operating recommendations that reduce systemic risk," according to a blog post Nvidia published. In addition to Nvidia, Hugging Face and Red Hat have agreed to participate in the project, and The Linux Foundation called on other organizations to make their own open-source contributions to it. "As an industry, we want to have this conversation out in the public," Justin Boitana, vice president of enterprise AI at Nvidia, said in an interview with WIRED. The goal is for SAFE to be "governed independently, with no single company or industry segment controlling its findings." Boitano declined to say whether Nvidia has discussed the White House's new framework with Trump officials. However, Boitano says, "I think [our] framework is one to look at," referring to SAFE. During the Agentic AI Summit at Berkeley over the weekend, OpenAI cofounder Wojciech Zaremba, who currently serves as the head of AI resilience at the company's philanthropic arm, said that the AI industry is "entering a new era." "Imagine what would happen if, all of a sudden, the locks to your house stopped working," Zaremba said during the same panel discussion where Meta's Dawn Song spoke. "That's the era that we are entering with cybersecurity... My guess is that it will be chaotic."

The White House's New AI Safety Framework Is None of Your Business

The Trump administration has cooked up a framework meant to ensure that new and powerful AI models don't pose a threat before being released to the public. According to Axios, the public will not be allowed to see it. The White House plans to keep its rubric for evaluating AI models confidential, sharing it only with the companies whose models will be judged against it. With incident after incident of AI models breaking containment and allegedly hacking into systems (which has somehow turned into a marketing tool for these companies who want to brag about how smart and capable their rogue technology is), it'd seem like a pretty ideal time to not only establish a set of standards, but to share them so that everyone knows what to expect and where the bar has been set for safety. The Trump administration is apparently cool with sticking with one out of two -- and even the one is pretty opaque. Per Axios, the White House finalized its AI oversight framework yesterday and had some industry players in the building on Tuesday to give it a look. Beyond the small group granted access, no one really knows what's in it. Per a Politico report, the few who have taken a peek work at Anthropic, Google, Meta and OpenAI. The only real indicator we have as to what the framework entails comes from the initial executive order, signed by Trump in June after some industry pushback initially caused him to get cold feet. That order requires the government to "develop and maintain a classified benchmarking process to assess the advanced cyber capabilities of AI models." It also calls for those benchmarks to be made available to developers and researchers "as appropriate," which the White House is apparently interpreting as "whenever we feel like it." Of course, it kinda doesn't matter what's in there, considering the whole thing is a voluntary process, anyway. So far, AI companies have chosen to comply, likely as part of their ongoing "We swear we're responsible" posturing that they perform to counterbalance their "Oops, our model did a cybercrime" campaign. And they may continue doing so as long as they do not find the secretive testing process particularly burdensome. But if that changes, companies could simply stop submitting their models for evaluation. There's not really a lever in place should that happen, unless they're hiding that, too.

Scoop: Inside Trump's AI framework

Why it matters: The voluntary framework will determine how the Trump administration reviews advanced AI models before release, but the White House isn't making it public. What's inside: The AI framework reviewed on Tuesday defines a covered frontier model as closed-source with state-of-the-art capabilities and national security risks, multiple sources briefed on meetings held at the White House said. * There is no clear definition of what is considered state-of-the art or a national security risk. * Open models are excluded, and the framework explicitly says nothing in it should be interpreted as restricting open models once they've been released. Zoom in: During the 30-day pre-release government review period, employees would be limited from accessing models. * The models would be stored in high-security environments and there would need to be detailed logs on who is accessing the models. * The review process will include various administration officials rather than a single office or agency. The big picture: The White House does not plan to publicly release the framework, Axios previously reported. * The White House on Tuesday held staff-level meetings with industry to review the framework, and companies that weren't invited remain in the dark about its contents. * It's also unclear which "trusted partners" will get early access to advanced models under the framework, including whether any foreign governments would qualify. Context: The executive order explicitly says the benchmarking process to assess advanced cyber capabilities of AI models will be classified. * There is no requirement in the order to publicly release the voluntary framework. What's next: Companies on Tuesday were reportedly encouraged to share models with the government that are as close to public release as possible instead of early stage ones, according to people familiar with the discussions.

White House won't publicly release AI model evaluation framework it reviewed today with Meta, Nvidia, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, variety of smaller companies | Fortune

The White House has no plans to publicly reveal the framework it's been working on for how it will vet frontier AI models prior to release. Instead, the details will be kept under wraps, only known to a select group of companies that may choose to participate in the process, which is voluntary. Several major tech companies traveled to Washington, D.C. today for a meeting to review the current draft of the proposal. Attendees included Meta, Nvidia, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, and a variety of smaller companies, according to sources familiar with the matter. Fortune is first to report that Microsoft was in attendance. The administration issued an executive order on June 2 mandating the creation of this framework within 60 days, or by August 1. The directive seeks to define which models are eligible for review, and instructs the AI labs that they have "up to 30 days" to submit them to the government prior to their public release. The secrecy surrounding the framework may not instill public confidence in the government's ability to vet and secure powerful AI models, especially after OpenAI confirmed its models hacked into another company, Hugging Face, last month. Anthropic later confirmed its models had done the same three times. The fact that the process is voluntary raises questions about how the administration will enforce it. Per the executive order, the framework is not "mandatory governmental licensing, preclearance, or permitting requirement for the development, publication, release, or distribution of new AI models, including frontier models." Chris McGuire, Senior Fellow for China and Emerging Technologies for the Council on Foreign Relations, called the decision to keep the framework behind closed doors "baffling." "We can't have secret, voluntary rules to regulate the most important tech in the world," McGuire wrote on X. It's unclear if the administration is operating behind closed doors for national security reasons, because it does not want input from outside researchers and experts, or for some other reason. The U.S. government has already been working with major AI companies to review their latest model releases. In June, it effectively took Anthropic's Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models off the market, subjecting them to export controls, and then worked with the company to fortify security before making them available. Then, the government worked closely with OpenAI ahead of its July 9 debut of GPT-5.6. On July 21, Google said it had made its 3.5 Flash Cyber model available to the government ahead of release as well. Current discussions on Capitol Hill likely aim to formalize these engagements. It's unclear if the framework is finalized or still in progress. In the meeting today, attendees floated the idea of a future event related to the proposal, perhaps to continue discussing it.

White House plans to keep AI framework under wraps

* Keeping it private means companies, policymakers, researchers and U.S. allies outside the process will be left guessing how the administration plans to implement one of its key AI policies. Driving the news: The White House on Tuesday held staff-level meetings with industry to go over the recently completed framework. Companies that weren't invited remain in the dark about its contents. * The AI framework comes as industry grapples with high-profile cyber-attacks and rapid advances by Chinese AI developers, reigniting a debate on how to deal with open-source models. * It's also unclear which "trusted partners" will get early access to advanced models under the framework, including whether any foreign governments would qualify. The European Union declined to comment and the U.K. did not respond to multiple requests for comment. * The White House declined to comment. Zoom in: Open-source models were discussed, sources familiar said, without elaborating. Nvidia staff participated in the meetings, the sources added. * Nvidia CEO and open-source advocate Jensen Huang was in D.C. last week meeting with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and President Trump. Catch up quick: The voluntary framework, outlined in a June executive order, is intended to give AI developers a process for working with the government to determine whether models under development fall within its scope.