The White House Is Keeping Its AI Cybersecurity Framework Secret

Summary

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. 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. If only tech companies know what's in the rulebook, it doesn't work.” 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. 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 nonprofit 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 well-being of the public.” For the past 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. 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 . 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,” said Justin Boitano, vice president of enterprise AI at Nvidia, in an interview with WIRED.