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 Aug. 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 a “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 at 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, or 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.