In June, the White House issued an executive order initiating a framework that — among other things — would encourage AI companies to share advanced AI models with the US government before sharing them with “other trusted partners.”
Now, the US government appears to be more forcibly encouraging that exclusive access. A Politico article reports that the White House has explicitly asked OpenAI and Anthropic to withhold their models from UKAISI — a well-regarded and well-resourced government testing organization based in the UK — until the US has had a chance to review.
It’s not clear who will be doing this review. The framework set up by the executive order was reportedly completed, but won’t be made public. But it does seem like the NSA might be playing a role. A Washington Sun article reports that the agency is “spending billions of dollars in taxpayer funds this year evaluating and testing advanced artificial intelligence models.”
In the absence of public testing benchmarks, we don’t know what they are testing for. Billions seems like a lot for this administration to be comfortable spending on safety, given it has repeatedly downplayed safety concerns. And if safety was the goal, I’m not sure why the US wouldn’t want trusted allies to test in parallel. I’m speculating here, but it seems more likely the NSA is trying to reap those frontier-level capabilities before anyone else can.
Earlier this month, Anthropic broke with earlier precedent and denied UKAISI access to Mythos 5.1, sparking speculation about why. The US government asking them not to now seems like the most plausible reason.
That’s a shame. AI testing and evaluations are unfortunately woefully inadequate (which is why we need a pause), but I’d rather have a model “vetted” by UKAISI, which is much more experienced in this domain. If US review delays model releases, I’m not confident companies won’t check off the “review” box and call it a day, in the interest of not delaying further.
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.