Trump administration’s closed-door AI framework catches tech policy sector off guard

Technology Trump administration’s closed-door AI framework catches tech policy sector off guard Comments: by Miranda Nazzaro - 08/10/26 6:00 AM ET Comments: Link copied by Miranda Nazzaro - 08/10/26 6:00 AM ET Comments: Link copied

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The Trump administration’s decision to keep its new framework on government AI testing out of public view has blindsided the tech policy community, who waited months to see the controversial process ironed out.

The framework was expected to detail the process and benchmarks for government testing of private AI models ahead of their public release. In turn, industry analysts hoped it could clear up the months of confusion over the administration’s influence in private model releases.

But when the White House hosted a handful of the largest frontier AI labs to brief them on the framework, attendees were told not to expect it to be released to the public, according to multiple sources familiar with the meeting.

“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, the head of AI policy at the Abundance Institute, said.

Representatives from labs Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI and Microsoft attended last week’s briefing, according to the sources familiar, while Forbes reported staff from Nvidia and other small companies attended. It is not clear whether non-attending firms will be able to access the framework.

The framework was a required part of President Trump’s executive order in June, which officially launched a new process for AI companies to voluntarily share their models with the government for up to 30 days before releasing them publicly.

The order gave multiple agencies 60 days to develop a classified benchmarking process to evaluate the cyber capabilities of AI models.

While benchmarks were expected to stay behind closed doors, the order also called for agencies to develop a “voluntary framework,” laying out how a company can be designated a “covered frontier model,” and collaborate with the federal government to select “trusted partners” that also have early access to new models.

Axios reported the framework defines a covered frontier model as closed-source with state-of-the-art capabilities and national security risks but the capability levels or national security risks were not specified.

The Foundation for American Innovation (FAI), a center-right think tank focused on technology and policy, filed a Freedom of Information Act request to the White House’s Office of Cyber Director for the release of the framework, according to Samuel Hammond, FAI’s chief economist and AI policy director.

Hammond said he is concerned the framework could be “thin” based on this report.

“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 told The Hill.

“The government can classify certain things if they need to,” Hammond added, “But final agency decisions like this are textbook public records.”

Chilson, who served as the acting chief of technology at the Federal Trade Commission during Trump’s first term, echoed these concerns, also warning it could “really slow roll” the release of American models while the government gets to keep its access.

“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,” Chilson said.

The framework follows a pivotal 60-day period for the industry, filled with new model delays and “rogue” AI models that upped anticipation for the official rules of the road.

Within weeks of Trump signing the executive order, both OpenAI and Anthropic dealt with delayed model rollouts amid the government’s cybersecurity concerns.

Anthropic was hit with an export control on its newest Fable and Mythos models in June, forcing the company to temporarily take the models offline while additional testing occurred.

While OpenAI did not face export controls, it announced weeks later it would delay the public rollout of GPT-5.6’s Sol, Terra and Luna at the request of the Trump administration.

Both firms eventually released their models following testing, but nearly two weeks later, OpenAI agents’ hacking of another company sent new shockwaves through the industry.

OpenAI revealed late last month its Sol model, and another unreleased model, went “rogue” during cybersecurity testing and escaped an isolated sandbox to access the internet and eventually breach the systems of Hugging Face, a technology startup.

Anthropic and Meta have since disclosed other incidents in which a misconfiguration by the cybersecurity company Irregular allowed models in isolated environments to access the internet and hack other systems.

These disclosures have stoked fears around the growing capabilities of AI when on its own, or used by a bad actor.

“There’s just a lot of public mistrust or distrust of the AI companies and concern about AI per se,” Hammond said. “I think there are benefits to just this being more public for creating greater public trust in whatever process is being implemented rather than it be sort of a shadowy, closed-door thing that only a handful of companies are privy to at the expense of both the public and their competitors.”

Trust and sentiment about AI has drastically fallen among Americans over the past year amid broader concerns about job losses, misuse and data centers.

A Bentley University-Gallup survey released last month showed 39 percent of respondents said they believe AI does more harm than good, compared with 31 percent who said so in 2023. “Reports that the US government won’t publish its AI regulatory framework are baffling,” Chris McGuire, who led U.S.-China AI policy at the National Security Council in the Biden administration, wrote social platform on X. “We can’t have secret, voluntary rules to regulate the most important tech in the world.”