Welcome to Eye on AI. Beatrice Nolan here. In today’s issue:
- Washington is keeping its AI rulebook private. Here’s what our sources are saying.
- Europe’s AI sovereignty is under threat. Could Mistral be the answer?
- OpenAI details how autonomous agents coordinated during the Hugging Face incident.
- Anthropic is hiring an AI chip design team.
- And more AI agent hacks emerge.
This week, the major players in the AI industry met with the U.S. government in a bid to end the confusion around the regulation of frontier AI models. The meeting was convened at the White House on Tuesday, and featured OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Nvidia, and other leading AI companies. The upshot was a new voluntary framework that allows the government to review frontier models.
The companies who joined the White House confab agreed to the proposed arrangement—but, for now, the general public will not get to see it.
The administration does not plan to publish the framework it has spent the last two months developing after President Trump ordered officials in June to create it. What models are included, the thresholds, and the list of “trusted partners” who get early access to the most powerful models in the world are all still question marks for the public and much of the industry.
The June order already stipulated that the benchmarking process used to designate a “covered frontier model” may be classified, and that the determination would sit with the director of the NSA.
A source familiar with the situation told me that only a handful of companies were in the briefing room when the framework was discussed. This underscores a broader concern among some that U.S. AI regulation is increasingly being shaped in conversations among a handful of dominant firms. Smaller and open-source labs worry that these safety frameworks could influence the broader market structure and entrench the use of closed-sourced frontier models that are “government-approved.”
What’s actually in the framework?
Reports suggest that the models covered by the framework are defined as closed-source, demonstrating state-of-the-art capabilities, and presenting national security risks. However, the person familiar with the briefing said that neither “state-of-the-art” nor “national-security risk” have been clearly defined.
Developers can voluntarily hand such a model to the government for up to 30 days before release. Companies were reportedly told to submit models as close to launch-ready as possible rather than for early checkpoints—which is roughly where things stood in July—and the review will be run by an assortment of administration officials rather than a single agency.
Based on the accounts of sources familiar with the process, open-weight models appear to have been left out of the framework. Some have noted the exclusion could benefit companies trying to catch up with the leaders because they will confront fewer regulatory obstacles. At the same time, the exclusion would seem to exclude from oversight the AI models that Washington is most worried about: the open-weight releases from Alibaba, DeepSeek and Moonshot AI that keep landing uncomfortably close to the American frontier.
Even companies that work with open weights are unsure whether their models could be submitted, or what that would mean in practice. Some argue that open source models not being explicitly included could be worse for the companies that are making them, as it may push customers toward using “government-approved” closed-source alternatives.
Another thing that caught my eye was that, during the 30-day review window reportedly included in the framework, submitted models are to be held in high-security environments, where access will be logged in detail, and—per Axios—”employees would be limited from accessing models.”
That seems to suggest that the company’s own staff would be restricted, or at least limited, from using its own frontier model while Washington evaluates it. Internal deployment—where companies use an unreleased model themselves—has been cited as a blind spot in a lot of previous governance proposals.
It’s an especially hot topic at the moment since the recent hacks carried out by OpenAI’s escaped agents were in part indicated by a secret unreleased model.
Critics say the rules are still unclear
Criticism about the framework and the way the government has carried it out has been coming from all sides.
“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,” Americans for Responsible Innovation, a Washington-based AI policy nonprofit, said in a post on X. (The group has been pushing for more transparent, enforceable federal rules around advanced AI systems.)
R Street’s Adam Thierer, a resident senior fellow in technology and innovation, said the administration “appears destined to give us something far more arbitrary and burdensome” than its predecessor from the Biden administration “with this behind-closed-doors de facto licensing regime they are concocting.”
Meanwhile, Rep. Lori Trahan, co-sponsor of the new bipartisan FRONTIER Act, which would put frontier AI oversight in a civilian-led federal framework, argued AI governance “belongs in a civilian agency, where it can be seen and questioned, not buried inside the national security apparatus.”
Until the rulebook is brought into the open, critics warn, Washington may be quietly deciding who gets a head start in the AI race.
With that, here’s more AI news.
Beatrice Nolan
beatrice.nolan@fortune.com
@beafreyanolan
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com