Trump administration’s closed-door AI framework catches tech policy sector off guard

The Trump administration’s decision to keep its new framework on government AI testing out of public view has blindsided the tech policy community, who waited months to see the controversial process ironed out. 

The framework was expected to detail the process and benchmarks for government testing of private AI models ahead of their public release. In turn, industry analysts hoped it could clear up the months of confusion over the administration’s influence in private model releases. 

But when the White House hosted a handful of the largest frontier AI labs to brief them on the framework, attendees were told not to expect it to be released to the public, according to multiple sources familiar with the meeting.

“We were hoping for clarity around what and some certainty around how the process would work, and the fact that the framework is not going to be public makes that harder to get right,” Neil Chilson, the head of AI policy at the Abundance Institute, said. 

Representatives from labs Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI and Microsoft attended last week’s briefing, according to the sources familiar, while Forbes reported staff from Nvidia and other small companies attended. It is not clear whether non-attending firms will be able to access the framework.

The framework was a required part of President Trump’s executive order in June, which officially launched a new process for AI companies to voluntarily share their models with the government for up to 30 days before releasing them publicly.

The order gave multiple agencies 60 days to develop a classified benchmarking process to evaluate the cyber capabilities of AI models. 

While benchmarks were expected to stay behind closed doors, the order also called for agencies to develop a “voluntary........

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