What Should Be Done

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Nothing below is an official or unofficial view of OpenAI.

On the Current State of Affairs

When President Trump signed it earlier this month, I argued that the Executive Order on Cyber and AI, which claimed to establish a voluntary testing program for frontier AI models, was really establishing a de facto involuntary licensing/preapproval regime for frontier models. This analysis has proven correct. First the administration revoked public access to Fable, Anthropic’s latest frontier model, because of security fears. Now, it appears that OpenAI’s GPT 5.6 is being limited to only a small set of US companies at the request of the US government.

One major problem with this, as implemented, is that nobody knows what the requirements are to get licensed.

When I say “nobody” I mean it literally: the administration itself does not seem to know what safety standards or best practices a company would have to observe for them to be comfortable with the broad release of a model that matches or exceeds Mythos in capability.

This means that, every time a lab asks if they can release their model to the general public, the answer from the government will be “no.” This will be true until there is some sort of safety standard or specification that gives the government a sense that the models are safe.

The government, according to some reporting, is trying to make such a standard, but it is unclear what the timeline for its completion is. More importantly, it is also unclear (a) whether it will be public, given the aforementioned Executive Order’s reliance on a classified “voluntary” testing program and (b) whether it will be good, given how new many of the senior administration officials now involved in AI policy are new to the issue, combined with the complexity of the topic at hand. Nobody I know in the Trump administration has any frontier AI experience. Just a few months ago, someone with experience at both OpenAI and Anthropic was hired to run the Center fo…