Trump advisers tell AI firms they will not safety-test open-weight models

By Courtney Rozen

WASHINGTON, Aug 4 (Reuters) - ‌The Trump administration ​told AI ​developers on Tuesday that it will not put open-weight AI models through voluntary safety tests, according to two sources familiar with the discussions.

Open models, including ‌Nvidia's Nemotron and Meta's Llama, are AI systems with publicly accessible core ⁠components. Closed models are controlled by specific companies. Major U.S. developers of closed models are OpenAI, Google and ‌Anthropic.

The White House discussed the unpublished ‌testing rules with staff from Meta, Anthropic, Google, Nvidia and OpenAI, according to five sources familiar with the meeting.

The meeting follows disclosures from OpenAI and Anthropic that their AI ​tools breached the systems of other companies. The hacks raised concerns among U.S. lawmakers about whether increasingly capable AI models could be used to conduct or facilitate cyberattacks. ⁠OpenAI on Tuesday said the company's models were involved in another cybersecurity incident during testing and that the situation involved ​AI systems accessing the internet.

The White House's media office did not respond to a request for comment on the meeting from Reuters.

Sharing the framework ​with a small group of companies without making ‌it public "deepens a serious gap in federal oversight, leaving open questions about how the federal government plans to evaluate the safety and security of ⁠advanced AI models," said tech policy advocacy group Americans for Responsible Innovation. The group pushes U.S. officials to implement policies that "protect the public from harm," according to its website.

The Trump administration said in ⁠June the tests would be voluntary, and designed for AI models with sophisticated hacking capabilities. OpenAI and ​Anthropic both have models with advanced cybersecurity capabilities.

Five Democratic senators called on Trump on Tuesday to work with Congress to pass legislation making testing permanent for the most advanced American-made AI models, called "frontier models."

"The ‌United States cannot afford to create a policy environment in which the most advanced American AI systems are subject to opaque, case-by-case restrictions ‌while Chinese alternatives appear cheaper, easier to access, and more predictable to deploy," the senators said ⁠in the letter.

The Trump administration has said ‌little in public beyond ​that U.S. officials are monitoring the OpenAI hack. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman visited the White House last week.

(Reporting by Courtney Rozen; Editing by Jan Harvey, ‌Rod Nickel)

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