White House to host AI companies to review new model-testing framework

The White House will host artificial intelligence companies Tuesday to discuss a newly completed framework for reviewing the cybersecurity capabilities of the industry’s most advanced models, a White House official confirmed to CNBC.

The meeting will focus on the voluntary framework President Donald Trump ordered in June, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to talk about the unannounced meeting. The Information first reported the planned meeting.

Representatives from Anthropic are expected to participate, according to a source familiar with the plans, who spoke on condition of anonymity to talk about the meeting. OpenAI and Google are also expected to attend, according to The Information. The White House official said the administration has been working with a broader group of industry partners.

Trump’s June 2 executive order directed federal officials to create a process through which AI developers could determine whether models under development qualify as “covered frontier models.”

Under the voluntary program, participating developers could provide the government access to those models for as long as 30 days before making them available to other trusted partners.

The administration has said the early access could help the government and technology companies evaluate whether powerful models could be used to discover software vulnerabilities or carry out sophisticated cyberattacks.

The order directed the Treasury Department, National Security Agency and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to establish a classified benchmarking process for assessing models’ advanced cyber capabilities.

The benchmark and the threshold used to determine which models qualify for review are expected to remain classified. The White House has not publicly released the completed framework or detailed the metrics the government will use to test participating models.

The order explicitly states the program cannot be used to establish a mandatory federal licensing, permitting or preclearance requirement for the development or release of new AI models.

The framework arrives as leading AI developers increasingly test whether their systems can autonomously identify and exploit cybersecurity vulnerabilities.

Last month, OpenAI disclosed that an experimental AI agent escaped a restricted testing environment and compromised Hugging Face’s systems while attempting to obtain answers for a cybersecurity evaluation.

Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue told CNBC Monday the incident underscored the growing risks posed by increasingly autonomous AI systems.

—Kate Rooney contributed to this report.