WASHINGTON – The Trump administration plans to host artificial intelligence companies at the White House on Aug 4 to discuss a new US framework for conducting voluntary safety tests of AI models, according to people familiar with the matter.
OpenAI, Anthropic PBC and Alphabet Inc’s Google are among the AI developers planning to attend, according to the people, who described the meeting on condition of anonymity because it hasn’t yet been announced.
The recently completed framework springs from a June executive order by President Donald Trump on AI cybersecurity that outlined an opt-in approach to safety reviews of models and greater efforts to shore up critical computer systems.
The framework has not yet been released publicly, and Trump’s order indicated that some of its benchmarks would remain confidential.
Nonetheless, it marks the Trump administration’s latest step toward addressing AI security issues, an initiative that accelerated in April after Anthropic warned that its Mythos model was adept at finding computer vulnerabilities and strictly limited its release.
Spokespeople for the White House and the three companies declined to comment. The Information reported earlier on the Aug 4’s meeting plan.
Adding urgency to the effort, OpenAI and Anthropic have disclosed in recent weeks that a handful of their models escaped secure testing environments and hacked third-party organisations.
At the same time, both companies have chafed at what they see as an inconsistent approach to AI safety reviews, and are looking to the new framework to bring more consistency to what had been initially presented as a voluntary programme.
In June, weeks after Trump signed the order and signalled a largely hands-off approach to testing, the Commerce Department barred Anthropic from sharing its two most powerful models with foreign nationals, citing concerns that safety guardrails could be circumvented.
The company temporarily disabled access to its Fable 5 model and its selectively shared Mythos 5 model, eventually making changes to address the administration’s objections.
Partly in response to the industry’s complaints of an ad-hoc approach to model reviews, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent proposed creating an independent regulatory agency that would give companies a significant say over safety reviews.
The contours of that plan align with a proposal from Google DeepMind’s leader Demis Hassabis, who was in Washington last month to meet with policymakers.
Bessent’s model would set up a system similar to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, but apply to the artificial intelligence industry, Bloomberg News has reported. It remains unclear if that plan would be part of the AI cybersecurity order implementation or a separate effort.
The discussions on Aug 4 will take place less than two months before Trump meets with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping for a high-profile summit in Washington where the competition for AI leadership between the world’s two largest economies will take centre stage.
US officials are now grappling with how to respond to a wave of new AI models from Chinese firms that rival top offerings from American labs.
The release of the new Kimi K3 model in July by Chinese startup Moonshot AI undermined investor confidence in the durability of the US lead in AI while raising questions about the hundreds of billions of dollars in data centre investments.
Kimi, which costs a fraction of the price of top US offerings, nears their performance in some domains.
That challenge was highlighted by recent moves by other Chinese developers.
Over the weekend, DeepSeek expanded access to its latest model and on Aug 3, Alibaba Group Holding unveiled its own new system, Qwen3.8-Max, which the company said is on par with Anthropic.
The slew of releases has fomented tech industry debate over how the US should respond to open-weight AI models from China that cost far less than the best US products while approaching their performance in some domains.
Silicon Valley leaders including Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang have insisted that open-weight models, which allow users to download and customise the technology, are good for the long-term development of AI and help bolster its security.
In public statements, with dozens of companies signing in support, they’ve urged the US to refrain from restricting open models.
Other key tech industry figures, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, have suggested that the gains made by Chinese AI models violate US rules, concerns echoed by Bessent and other top US officials.
In July, White House Director of Science and Technology Policy Michael Kratsios accused Moonshot of illegally acquiring Nvidia’s advanced Blackwell chips, the most powerful AI accelerators on the market. It’s unclear how many of these processors the US government believes Moonshot has.
Bloomberg has reported that Moonshot has a computing power agreement with Alibaba for the use of about 20,000 Nvidia chips, forming a substantial chunk of the overall capacity Moonshot uses for its Kimi models.
Kratsios also said Moonshot improperly extracted data from US models through a process known as distillation, a style of reverse engineering that US AI companies have warned officials about for most of this year. Using this technique, researchers feed the outputs of one model into a new version, a process that turns out to be an efficient way to recreate some of the parent model’s capabilities. BLOOMBERG
