How did the government decide OpenAI’s frontier model was safe to release?
OpenAI is rolling out its latest advanced LLM, Sol, for wide public access. Sol is considered to be at least on par with Anthropic’s Fable
OpenAI is rolling out its latest advanced LLM, Sol, for wide public access. Sol is considered to be at least on par with Anthropic’s Fable, a model whose capabilities (or ownership) stressed out the White House enough to that it was briefly banned from public access. So how did these models get the ok for release? Short answer: Nobody’s quite sure. “Frankly, I don’t have visibility into those exact processes, so yes, I don’t feel like I have enough information to say whether they’re adequate or not,” Mina Narayanan, a senior research analyst at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, told TechCrunch. “Anthropic did say that they were in conversations with the government, and that they developed a classifier to detect jailbreak attempts, and they’ve implemented defensive gap strategies to prevent future jailbreaks, but exactly what that dialog looked like between the government and Anthropic and OpenAI is unclear.” Dean W. Ball, a former Trump policy advisor who now works for OpenAI, wrote that “nobody knows what the requirements are to get licensed” in his newsletter last month. Andy Konwinski, a computer scientist who co-founded Databricks, Perplexity, and the Laude Institute, said he’s never spoken to anyone who understands the process, even employees at frontier labs. “It’s existentially a problem,” he tells TechCrunch. “Safety or not, it’s about who has the power to make decisions—who gatekeeps and decides on permissions?” Eighteen months into the Trump administration, there is still little clarity about how to move forward, despite—or, some critics allege, because — of the industry figures setting policy. Last month, after weeks of infighting, an executive order was published laying out a roadmap for evaluating frontier models, but the specifics have yet to be filled in, other than what won’t exist.
“There will not be an FDA for AI,” Sriram Krishnan, a former Andreesen Horowitz partner who served as a senior advisor for AI in the White House until last month, told the Financial Times. Notably, there’s still no agreement on what kinds of models require government scrutiny, or what agency or agencies should perform those evaluations. For now, the Department of Commerce’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation seems to be taking the lead, but the executive order instructs six cabinet agencies to determine a final process by early August. What has emerged in the meantime is, at best, ad hoc. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on CNBC that the process involved conversations with the officials like Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, and US national cyber director Sean Cairncross, but it’s not clear who the experts that tested the models were or how they did that. OpenAI declined to share details on the government’s process with TechCrunch, but pointed to the results of several external evaluations by organizations like UK AISI, SecureBio and Irregular in the latest model’s safety card. As with Anthropic’s Fable roll-out, OpenAI previewed the model for the government and select users ahead of wider release, but we don’t know who who all of those users were or how they were chosen. In a late June blog post, the company said “we don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default,” saying it would work with the government to develop a different path forward. The backdrop to those conversations, however, includes Altman reportedly offering as much as 5% to OpenAI’s equity for the administration’s so-called “Trump Accounts,” and OpenAI president Greg Brockman’s role as the largest publicly-known donor to Trump’s mid-term political operation.
The BriefWire