Trump’s AI testing plan is limited and vague

The Trump administration’s framework for assessing potential cybersecurity risks posed by advanced AI reportedly has no interest in testing open models. Axios reports that not only do the voluntary guidelines outright exclude open models — meaning anyone can download them and inspect their core components — but the framework explicitly says it can’t be used to restrict open models after they’ve been released.

The AI testing framework was created after President Trump signed an executive order in June, requesting that AI companies share their frontier models with the federal government prior to release to address cybersecurity concerns. AI companies, including Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google, reportedly attended a briefing about the finalized model testing framework at the White House yesterday, but the Trump administration isn’t planning to release the framework details publicly.

According to Axios, the framework sets a 30-day grace period for the government to review new models, and will only apply to closed-source AI models that have state-of-the-art capabilities and carry national security risks. The guidelines don’t actually define what “state-of-the-art” or “national security risk” means in this context, however, which is bizarre for an initiative that’s supposedly designed specifically to analyze such things.

While AI companies are under no obligation to comply with the voluntary framework, frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic have been actively seeking guidance on how to release models without triggering government restrictions. The framework’s failure to define frontier or what is a national security risk also means much of this is still ambiguous, which could be a problem for smaller AI providers that want to stay in the White House’s good books.