ARC Prize Foundation Statement on the US AI Action Plan

ARC Prize Foundation Statement on the US AI Action Plan

Last week, the White House released its AI Action Plan. We’re encouraged to see the White House take transparency and measurement seriously as catalysts for AI progress.

In our March 2025 submission to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), ARC Prize Foundation laid out three recommendations:
Build a diverse ecosystem of independent AI evaluation organizations
Establish a federal hub for AI benchmarking
Ensure the US leads on global AI standards

All three made it into the final plan. Here’s where our recommendations show up:

Encourage Open Source AI

We believe open source is essential for AI progress and back a growing community of researchers pushing the field forward. As co-founder Mike Knoop put it: “We are idea-constrained for AGI. The more openness, the stronger our innovation environment.”

The AI Action Plan echoes this view, highlighting open source as essential for research, innovation, and national competitiveness.

Advance the Science of AI

In our submission, we urged OSTP to “accelerate America’s path to advanced AI by defining what matters… [leveraging] benchmarks to spotlight technological challenges and focus AI researcher efforts toward solving them.”

The plan reflects this, with renewed federal support for breakthrough research that can “unlock entirely new capabilities.”

Build an AI Evaluations Ecosystem

We recommended that “the Administration commit to maintaining a national AI benchmarking initiative, within an existing agency such as NIST/CAISI, to coordinate AI evaluation efforts across government and provide expert guidance.”

This is now policy. OSTP has tasked NIST, CAISI, DOE, and NSF with leading evaluation science, building testbeds, and convening the community. It’s the clearest endorsement yet of what ARC Prize has long argued: definitions drive evaluations, and evaluations drive progress.

We believe evaluations are strategic…