The US government is negotiating voluntary standards with AI companies covering how new models get released, according to the Financial Times, with an announcement said to be possible within the next week.
The standards would reportedly set benchmarks and timelines for advanced models, while clarifying who gets access to them inside the US and abroad.
The talks build on an executive order Trump signed in June, which asked developers to give the government early access to frontier models before wider release.
That order stopped well short of a mandatory regime, and the version that emerged was already a retreat from an earlier draft with a much longer review window, as we have reported.
Getting there took months of infighting. A three-way turf battle between the Commerce Department, national security officials and pro-industry aides had stalled a tougher version of the order weeks earlier, after Trump scrapped its signing over fears it would slow American AI development.
According to the FT's sourcing, Washington's concern is less about consumer harm than about advanced systems ending up useful to military or intelligence services in China, Russia or other adversarial states.
The reported framework would let officials flag a model as a “covered frontier model” and negotiate access terms before it ships, without imposing a licensing requirement that the White House has explicitly ruled out.
Google is said to be among the companies already in discussions, reportedly in connection with an advanced coding model in development.
Neither Google nor the White House has confirmed the specifics of those talks publicly, and the reporting rests on the FT's sourcing rather than an official statement, so the scope and timing should be read as provisional until an announcement materialises.
The mechanics track closely with what June's order laid out. Within 60 days of signing, the Treasury Department, the National Security Agency, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the National Institute of Standards and Technology were tasked with building a classified benchmarking process for assessing advanced models' cyber capabilities.
That timeline puts early August as a plausible point for the framework to firm up, which lines up with the announcement window the FT describes.
Several major labs, including Microsoft, Google and xAI, had already agreed in principle earlier this year to let the government test their models before launch, a step that left Meta as the last major holdout on pre-release security reviews.
OpenAI, meanwhile, has faced its own version of this dynamic, having been asked by the administration to slow a subsequent model's release while reviews caught up.
What is being described now looks like an attempt to turn that patchwork into something closer to a standard process, with defined benchmarks rather than case by case negotiation.
Sam Altman told Congress earlier this year that he would rather see funding for testing infrastructure than a formal approval regime, a preference a voluntary standards framework would largely satisfy.
This newest round of talks reads as an attempt to give the June retreat some operational substance before critics conclude the administration simply walked away from oversight.
A voluntary standard that most major labs sign up to would let the White House claim a functioning regime without defending a mandatory one in court.
Whether the standards actually reduce friction, or simply codify the ad hoc reviews already under way, depends on details neither the FT's sourcing nor the June order has yet made public.
Companies retain the right to decline participation without penalty, which means the framework's force depends entirely on how many of the largest labs opt in. Neither the White House nor the companies named in the FT's report responded immediately to requests for comment relayed through wire services at the time of writing.
The timeline the FT cites, an announcement within the week, gives a concrete point at which the shape of the framework should become clearer.