Trump Administration Considers Mandatory Pre-Release Vetting of AI Models
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:
The Trump administration is said to be discussing an executive order that would establish a government review process for new AI models before they're released to the public, The New York Times has reported, citing unnamed U.S. officials.
The proposed order would create an "AI working group" of tech executives and government officials to develop oversight procedures, with White House staff briefing leaders from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI on the plans last week. These discussions, if true, would represent a sharp departure from the administration's current stance as something of a deregulatory champion - immediately upon taking office, the Trump administration revoked a Biden-era executive order addressing AI risks.
The sudden reversal coincides with a leadership vacuum in White House AI policy. David Sacks, who led the administration's deregulation push as AI czar, left the role in March, with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent having since taken a more active role in shaping AI policy, according to The New York Times.
The new approach sounds a lot like the UK's AI Security Institute model, where government bodies evaluate frontier models against safety benchmarks before and after deployment. Officials told the New York Times that the NSA, the Office of the National Cyber Director, and the Director of National Intelligence could oversee the review. Critically, the system would grant the government early access to models without blocking their release.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the catalyst for all this appears to have been Anthropic's Mythos model, which the company's marketing described as capable of finding thousands of critical software vulnerabilities and too dangerous for public release.
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