The Trump administration is expanding its secretive AI safety framework to inspect some open models before they are made public.
Earlier this month, Axios reported that the Trump administration was putting together an AI safety framework to assess the cyber capabilities of models, but would keep the whole thing secret, except from the model providers. Now, WIRED is reporting that although the framework currently only applies to closed models from top providers like OpenAI, it will soon include open models that are deemed advanced enough.
The administration is reportedly worried that only giving official approval to closed models would harm the reputation of open models, and “paradoxically disincentivize” American companies from releasing them.
Open models are receiving renewed interest in the American AI world after several new releases from Chinese AI labs sparked chatter that Chinese open models are catching up to the capabilities of some of the latest closed offerings from industry-leading American AI companies. The freak-out started last month when Moonshot released Kimi K3, an open-source model that was cheaper yet on par with or better than some of the latest offerings from the likes of Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google.
Experts theorized that the Trump administration would respond to this threat with blanket bans, and that did seem to be their main strategy for some time, until AI industry leaders decided to make open models a cause they wanted to fight for. Numerous AI companies, including Meta, Microsoft and Palantir, signed an open letter titled “Open Weights and American AI Leadership,” urging the Trump administration to avoid restricting open models, arguing that it would only cause the U.S. to fall behind as China races ahead, and claiming that closed models are “not inherently safe.”
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who has long championed the idea that open models will be key to winning the global AI race and made this case to the Trump administration before, even decided to make his first-ever X post about this.
“Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty,” Huang said in the post. “The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models.”
Nvidia’s passion for this extended to the formation of the Open Secure AI Alliance, a coalition meant to aid the proliferation of open-weight AI models.
OpenAI hadn’t initially joined the letter, but CEO Sam Altman later gave his co-sign. Anthropic refrained from backing the letter, which has caused the pro-open model camp to accuse CEO Dario Amodei of trying to push the Administration towards adopting a stricter stance in favor of closed models. Anthropic, which had a very public falling out with the Trump administration not too long ago, is becoming quite the leader in closed models, so critics claim anything that discourages the proliferation of open models would only help their business. Amodei has rejected the accusation.