All right, Casey. First up on the show this week, we have to talk about these new White House AI rules that we are not getting this week, but that we are hearing about this week. Yes. In one of the strangest developments of recent times in AI and AI regulation, the White House has finalized its framework for testing new frontier AI models from the big American AI companies. This is something we've talked about on the show very recently. But it's been a very weird week because they have not released this framework. And it's been sort of rolled out in this very surprising and secretive way.
Yeah. Usually in a democracy when the government creates new rules, what they'll do is they'll share that with people so that everyone knows what the rules are. In this case, they're really limiting the number of people who get to see those rules. Kevin.
Yeah. It reminds me, I was talking to someone yesterday at one of the labs and they compared it to regulatory Calvinball. Do you remember in Calvin and Hobbes they have this sort of like imaginary game where they just make up the rules as they go? That's what it feels like to people what is happening in Washington with AI right now.
And that's also just basically how executive orders work because you just sort of say what you think the law should be.
Yes. So, we thought last week when we taped the show that we were going to see an actual framework, this thing that had been in the works for a very long time that we knew was coming. And then on Tuesday of this week, we learned that the White House did not actually plan to publicly release these rules at all. They did apparently give a private briefing to representatives from some of the American AI companies, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc., where they told them what this sort of framework and what these new rules for AI were going to be, but they did not actually give many details to the rest of the world about what is in this framework.
That's right. So today we are going to walk you through what we know of what is in it. We'll tell you what is still a secret and then we'll talk a little bit about what we think the implications are for the industry and for AI safety in general. But before we do that, we should probably do our AI disclosures. I work for the New York Times, which is suing OpenAI, Microsoft, and Perplexity, and my fiance works at Anthropic. So, according to Maria Curry from Axios, the framework gives the government a 30-day window to access frontier models before they are released publicly. Basically, if you are OpenAI or Anthropic and another company releasing a closed-source what they're calling frontier model, which has advanced capabilities and potentially dangerous ones, you can submit that to the government. They will have 30 days to test out that model, to run a bunch of evaluations on it to determine whether it's safe or not. During that window, the models will be stored in quote high-security environments and
the same high-security environments that models now routinely break out of, presumably.
No, even more secure than that. And multiple administration offices will be involved rather than one single agency. And the big headline is that this whole thing, this whole 30-day testing window is voluntary, at least if you believe the Trump administration's statements about this. Yeah. Although, of course, the immediate question is like, well, okay, what if a company did not volunteer to agree to the like what would happen to them? I imagine the administration would apply export controls in the exact same way that it did with Fable. But, you know, Kevin, I wanted to get your take on one of the details you just shared, which is that employees will apparently not be allowed to use models once they're submitted for testing. 30 days is a long time to go without a frontier model. And so, I wonder how companies are going to adapt. Like, I almost wonder if they'll sort of create like, you know, frontier model A and frontier model B and submit frontier model A for testing so that they can continue to use frontier model B. They're going to game the system in some weird way because I truly can't imagine companies agreeing to just stop using their best models for a month.
Oh, totally. I mean, it's even more complicated than that because the way that these models are deployed is like researchers are making changes to the models up until like the hour before they are publicly released and then after that.
Yeah. So like it is not like it's like writing a blog post that way.
Exactly. So the way that these models are deployed is very sort of ad hoc and fast-moving. So like it might be the case for a very powerful frontier model that like they are making changes to this model and the safeguards like up until the very minute it is released and then they might make additional changes based on things that they observe when the models are released. You know, a user finds a jailbreak on the model and you have to like quickly patch that by doing some additional post-training or RL on the model. It's like submitting an essay to a college professor but you submitted it via Google Doc. So even though you know the deadline was midnight, you're sort of in there at 2 a.m. and you're still fixing the typos.
Exactly. So it like raises the very obvious question of like, okay, you're Anthropic, you're OpenAI, you have a model, you want to submit it to the government for this 30-day review process. Like does that mean you essentially have to freeze the model in amber like at this checkpoint and then not work on it for 30 days? What if you find something in those 30 days that you want to patch? Does that mean you have to re-up your 30-day window? Like extend it out more. There are just so many questions about how this will actually work in practice that I don't think anyone has fully thought through.
Sure. And what I imagine they'll do is say like, okay, well, we're sort of, you know, evaluating like the bulk of your model, but you'll be allowed to ship like, you know, bug fixes and product improvements after we sort of give it the once-over. But it's just in the nature of these models that one of those bug fixes might introduce some significant new problems. So yeah, this feels kind of messy.
Okay, what about the whole open versus closed thing?
Oh yeah, this is the other big headline. Open-weight models are explicitly excluded from it. They are not considered covered frontier models and as such they are not required or encouraged to submit their models to be tested by the government during this 30-day review period. And in part this makes sense to me in the sense that the best open models today are not frontier models and they have not been caught causing the sorts of problems on the internet that the frontier models have. So like in this moment as we record, I think that's totally fine. I think the question is what happens when a few months from now one of these open-weight models may catch up to the frontier. How will that change the dynamics?
Kevin, this is the part that really made my head spin and forced me into a state of sort of stupor over this new framework. Like that was what caused it.
It's like open-source models right now, many of them are, you know, very sort of middle of the road. They're not very capable. They're certainly not frontier models, but they will get there soon. And at that point, basically, the US government is saying, "We're not concerned about the very part of this technology that could be the most dangerous," right? Sort of explicitly excluding and carving out of this requirement the models that people in the community are most worried about, right? And let me just sort of set up the other dynamic that you can imagine which is three or six months from now there is a Chinese open-weight model that is about as good as Claude Fable or GPT 5.6 and they make that available via open weights. And when that happens, they are at least at this point not going to go through any sort of testing process, right? And so you're just in this situation where it may be easier for an American company to use a Chinese frontier model than an American frontier model, which up until this point has been the explicit situation that the Trump administration has said it wants to avoid.
Yes, it's a very perplexing set of circumstances, but I assume there's a certain perplexity to it. I assume this is the result of the open-weights letter that we talked about from Nvidia and this host of other American companies and all of the sort of backstage lobbying that has been going on on this issue. It worked. They got their exception and their carve-out for open-weight models.
What do you think was more persuasive to the Trump administration? Was it the open letter or was it the donations to the Trump ballroom?
I have a guess, I have a guess, but I'll leave it to the listener. But I think, look, I've spoken to a number of people about this particular carve-out. Like I think the general sense is like at some point this will have to change, right? There will be a major incident, some kind of security incident involving an open-weight model and this decision will just have to be reversed. They will have to subject open-weight models to the same sort of testing requirements that closed-source models are required to go through as of now. And it's just like not a good thing that we're kind of waiting for that to happen before we start testing these models.
Yeah. All right, let's talk about a few things that we don't know that I would like to know. And so if you are a listener to the Hard Fork podcast and you know the answers to these questions, just email
[email protected] and we'll read your email on the show. Number one, what is the actual pass-fail threshold? Right? Like what is the Trump administration considering safe versus not safe? This was a big question about GPT 5.6 and Fable, right? What made the administration eventually say, "Okay, you can ship these." That to me seems like question number one. Number two, they are apparently going to let these frontier models during the testing phase be shared with trusted partners. Do I have that right? Yes. But we don't know who the trusted partners are, right? So like you can imagine previous administrations considering foreign governments trusted partners, right? Like maybe you would let our allies in the United Kingdom have early access to these models. In this moment, we don't know who a trusted partner is. So those are my two big questions that I have about this model, Kevin.
Yeah, I have many more questions about this model. Like who even inside the government is going to be responsible for doing this testing? Like which agencies are going to be involved? What kinds of subject matter experts? All of that seems very vague and up for discussion and potentially the government doesn't even know yet, which is why it's sort of making all these vague statements and declining to release the framework publicly. I think it's also just worth like stepping back for a moment and remembering the AI industry's reaction to the Biden administration's White House executive orders on AI. As people will remember, the Biden administration had this very long executive order covering all these different aspects of AI risk and safety and deployment. And the criticism of those rules at the time was that they didn't have any teeth. The good thing about those was they were released publicly, right? Which is people could see them, debate them, argue about them, the companies could lobby against them or lobby for them depending on their views. This new framework from the Trump administration has the opposite problem, right? It does have teeth. Like you can, you know, it's voluntary, but we're putting that in air quotes because it's like voluntary in the same way that like, you know, paying your loan shark is voluntary. It's voluntary in the way that paying your taxes is voluntary. You cannot pay them. There may be consequences but yeah
but like it is also just not public. Like it is a secret regulatory regime that even the people participating in the regulatory process do not fully understand and I just think that is a completely untenable long-term situation. You are asking these companies to play by rules that they do not understand.
No, I mean honestly this just feels very Chinese to me. You know there's a set of secret rules that you have to follow or else. Kevin, give us your sort of overall take on these new rules that we have and maybe what you would like to see in the weeks and months ahead.
I mean, my overall take is that we just can't know. Like one basic thing that they could have done is to put out at least a detailed summary of this framework. Like I understand the rationale that some folks at the White House have given about like, you know, well some of this involves like classified information about national security.
Yeah, like we don't want to tell you like every single test that we're going to give the model because then our adversaries would use that information against us.
Exactly. I understand wanting to withhold some of the details, but at least sort of give us a vague high-level sense of what you are looking for when you're testing a model. I also just wish that they had been written by Congress, right? Like I don't think this is the sort of thing that you just want to be like decided by fiat by the president. I think this is something where you want a lot of input from all sides. I think you want a public debate about it. I think that ultimately this should probably result in some sort of new kind of regulator. Demis Hassabis, until recently the CEO of Google DeepMind, put out a statement just a few weeks ago calling for something just like that. That is still the direction that I hope we go. But in the meantime we get the secret rules.
So, I think one obvious winner from this new slate of White House rules are the open-source advocates, the companies that make and want to keep making open-source models and want to build on top of open-source models. Who are the obvious losers here? Like who should be upset about this regime? Is this going to be a problem for OpenAI and Anthropic, this new testing period? Like do you think this should make us feel any differently about their prospects?
I think that in the moment it will probably feel more annoying to them than anything else. I think that if you accept the premise that we have two frontier labs right now and that they are OpenAI and Anthropic, the rules presumably are going to apply to both of them equally. And so to the extent that it slows them down from releasing new models, they're both going to be equally affected by that. And as somebody who is not particularly rooting for there to be a speed-up in the release of new models, I think that that might sort of be okay. Where I think this will get dicey and which I do think would just cause the administration to have to revisit this is the not unlikely scenario of a Chinese company with an open-weight model getting to roughly the frontier or even just getting to the point of the sort of Claude Fable, GPT 5.6 class. Once there is a model like that that is available in the open weights, then I think you're going to start to hear the screams out of OpenAI and Anthropic saying, hey, you are causing Americans to give up their lead in innovation and you are slowing down progress in a way that is not just going to hurt us but may hurt the entire economy of the United States and potentially even our national security.
Well, like help me make sense of this because this was my sort of naive first impression of this framework is, oh, they're slowing down the American labs and they're speeding up the Chinese ones, right? Because the open-weight models don't have to go through this testing process. The American closed-source models do have to go through this testing process or, you know, technically it's voluntary, but we all know what that means. Like how is this not just doing the exact opposite of what this administration has signaled it wants to do in the past, which is allow the US AI industry to go as fast as they want and to try to hobble or slow down China?
