The White House sets open weights free

TL;DR: After two months, the White House’s voluntary AI review framework has been finalized—but we don’t get to know exactly what’s in it. One detail that has leaked: It doesn’t cover open-weight models. This may be a sign that, after the recent hullabaloo around Chinese versions, the Trump administration wants more homegrown open models.

What happened: The age of (voluntary) AI oversight is here—and so far it’s mainly been…confusing. The latest example: The White House doesn’t plan to publicly release its AI review framework, per Axios—though it held closed-door meetings with AI companies to discuss it yesterday. It’s a move that one critic called “baffling,” and some elected officials have called for more clarity around the government’s whiplash-inducing approach to regulating AI overall (including its abrupt export control order on Fable and Mythos in June).

This new framework would evaluate the cyber capabilities of AI models before they’re publicly released. Among the few morsels that insiders revealed: It only covers closed-source “state-of-the-art” models that pose a national security risk. But what “state of the art” means—and why open-weight models aren’t included—is a little murky.

A win for the open-weight camp?: The White House hasn’t commented on the open-weight exclusion, but there are probably a few reasons for the move. For one, anyone can download open weights and remove any safeguards, making a government safety review pretty toothless (especially one that’s voluntary).

But likely the bigger reason? Leaving out open weights might encourage US companies to build more of them, competing against China’s flood of cheaper, increasingly capable open models. In a recent interview, National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross said the administration is “extremely interested in looking at ways to build US open source” and make it “the preferential adoption by planet Earth.” All this means Jensen Huang is probably having a great day—Dario Amodei, maybe not so much.

Bottom line: There hasn’t been much clarity around the White House’s regulation of AI—including whether its review scheme is truly “voluntary”—but the government is apparently trying to walk a fine line between oversight and innovation. At least for now. —WK