View / The White House maintains a little obscurity for AI security

The White House says it discussed a framework for evaluating the cybersecurity risks of frontier AI models with OpenAI and Anthropic, but it doesn’t plan to release details publicly.

The secrecy (frontier labs are being asked to submit the most powerful models for assessment 30 days before releasing them) has drawn criticism from AI safety advocates. There’s a reason we don’t have secret methods of approving new pharmaceuticals or secret tests for car safety: Keeping the whole process secret does not inspire confidence in the government’s ability to sufficiently evaluate the models and keep people safe.

But the takeaway shouldn’t be fear that the US government is hiding the ball. It’s that there isn’t a ball to hide yet. Think about the early airplanes of the 1920s: suddenly people had a way to fly, but it was also a good way to die. It took decades of new regulation and advances in science and technology to push air travel to be one of the safest ways of moving around.

We still don’t know exactly how large language models work or whether they can be completely controlled.

But there is a lot more study and knowledge of AI safety in the private sector and the real use case for these guidelines is about giving the US government a head start on what’s coming. That could be strategically valuable when it comes to offensive cyber capabilities and defenses, something you’d want to keep private anyway.

There’s little expectation an AI model can truly be certified as “safe” — the technology is used in literally every industry and safety evaluations rely on valuable knowledge from past mistakes. No lab, nonprofit, or government agency can address the worst fears of the most extreme AI-safety critics: that AI models could one day be so powerful that humanity loses control of them. If you buy that argument, this is the first technology in history where we can’t afford to learn that way.