OpenAI is rolling out its latest advanced large language model, Sol, for wide public access. Sol is considered at least on par with Anthropic’s Fable — a model whose capabilities stressed the White House enough that it was briefly banned from public access. So how did these models get the go-ahead for release? The short answer: No one is quite sure.
An opaque process, by design
“Frankly, I don’t have visibility into those exact processes, so yes, I don’t feel like I have enough information to say whether they’re adequate or not,” Mina Narayanan, a senior research analyst at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, told Bitcoin World. “Anthropic did say they were in conversations with the government, and that they developed a classifier to detect jailbreak attempts, and they’ve implemented defensive gap strategies to prevent future jailbreaks. But exactly what that dialog looked like between the government and Anthropic and OpenAI is unclear.”
Dean W. Ball, a former Trump policy advisor who now works for OpenAI, wrote that “nobody knows what the requirements are to get licensed” in a post last month. Andy Konwinski, a computer scientist who co-founded Databricks, Perplexity, and the Laude Institute, said he has never spoken to anyone who understands the process — even employees at frontier labs. “It’s existentially a problem,” he told Bitcoin World. “Safety or not, it’s about who has the power to make decisions — who gatekeeps and decides on permissions?”
Eighteen months of uncertainty
Eighteen months into the Trump administration, there is still little clarity about how to move forward — despite, or some critics allege because of, the industry figures setting policy. Last month, after weeks of infighting, an executive order was published laying out a roadmap for evaluating frontier models, but the specifics have yet to be filled in, other than what will not exist. “There will not be an FDA for AI,” Sriram Krishnan, a former Andreesen Horowitz partner who served as a senior advisor for AI in the White House until last month, told the Financial Times.
Notably, there is still no agreement on what kinds of models require government scrutiny, or what agency or agencies should perform those evaluations. For now, the Department of Commerce’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation seems to be taking the lead, but the executive order instructs six cabinet agencies to determine a final process by early August.
An ad hoc system emerges
What has emerged in the meantime is, at best, ad hoc. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on CNBC that the process involved conversations with officials like Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, and US national cyber director Sean Cairncross. But it is not clear who the experts that tested the models were, or how they did that. OpenAI declined to share details on the government’s process with Bitcoin World, but pointed to the results of several external evaluations by organizations like UK AISI, SecureBio, and Irregular in the latest model’s safety card.
As with Anthropic’s Fable rollout, OpenAI previewed the model for the government and select users ahead of wider release — but we do not know who all of those users were or how they were chosen. In a late June blog post, the company said “we don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default,” saying it would work with the government to develop a different path forward.
Conflict of interest concerns
The backdrop to those conversations includes Altman reportedly offering as much as 5% of OpenAI’s equity for the administration’s so-called “Trump Accounts,” and OpenAI president Greg Brockman’s role as the largest publicly known donor to Trump’s mid-term political operation. It is hard for outside observers to separate those activities from the government’s apparently lighter-touch approach to regulating Sol.
Anthropic’s Fable, on the other hand, was briefly pulled from wider access when the US government forbade its use by foreign nationals — partly because of real concerns about users jailbreaking the model to access hacking capabilities, and partly due to personality clashes between Anthropic and the Trump administration. The threat of an export ban may have also led OpenAI to be more cooperative with the government’s unknown requests.
Industry perspectives on a broken system
From an industry perspective, a hands-off approach to regulation might seem appealing. But one that depends on personal connections to administration officials creates uncertainty and bad incentives. Konwinski told Bitcoin World that he worries true experts in this technology — “safety researchers, alignment researchers, interpretability researchers, but also data people, and people from all over the stack” — are not playing enough of a role in the model release process.
Konwinski argues that an “open commons” is the best way to actually balance safety and innovation. He points to models like the FDA, the NIH, or the national labs, which convene researchers, government officials, and private companies to reach a consensus on safety issues. Some of that comes down to the incentives of capitalism that have motivated AI researchers for more than a decade, and played out in court during Elon Musk’s lawsuit challenging OpenAI’s corporate structure.
Ball points out that the nature of the AI business requires companies to recoup much of their training costs shortly after their models are released, while they are still ahead of the competition. “Even if their intentions are good, there’s very clear legal obligations and fiduciary responsibility that are built right into the operating procedures,” Konwinski notes.
Possible paths forward
Ball, in his post, argued that the way forward will depend on third-party auditing organizations, licensed by the government, that will evaluate frontier labs’ approach to safety. Konwinski is also bullish about new institutional formats like focused research organizations that could help more disinterested experts from academia and the non-profit world access and evaluate frontier models.
For now, the secrecy around the development of AI is not going away — but it will also seed political challenges for an industry that Americans increasingly view with skepticism. “There’s not a sense that responsible people are driving forward these changes,” University of Wisconsin-Madison computer science professor Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau said last week at the Open Frontier conference.
At the same event, David Siegel, the computer scientist who founded Two Sigma, asked attendees to “imagine a situation, which I think would be very bad, [where] a small number of firms control the technology; the government, in their secretive laboratories, is evaluating whether or not the technology is suitable for use; and the general public and scientific community doesn’t really have any access to any of that stuff.” It seems we do not need to imagine it.
Conclusion
The approval process for frontier AI models like OpenAI’s Sol and Anthropic’s Fable remains largely opaque, with no clear standards, no designated agency, and no public accountability. While industry insiders and critics alike call for a more transparent and expert-driven framework, the current system relies on ad hoc conversations and personal relationships. Until a formal process emerges, the question of who decides whether a powerful AI is safe to release — and on what basis — will remain unanswered.
FAQs
Q1: Who decides if a frontier AI model like OpenAI’s Sol is safe to release?
A1: Currently, there is no formal, public process. Decisions appear to be made through ad hoc conversations between AI companies and various government officials, including the Secretary of Commerce and the US national cyber director. The specific experts who test the models and the criteria they use are not publicly disclosed.
Q2: Why was Anthropic’s Fable briefly banned?
A2: The US government temporarily restricted access to Anthropic’s Fable model, forbidding its use by foreign nationals. This was partly due to concerns about users jailbreaking the model to access hacking capabilities, and partly due to political tensions between Anthropic and the Trump administration.
Q3: Is there any effort to create a formal AI regulation process?
A3: Yes. An executive order published last month lays out a roadmap for evaluating frontier models, but the specifics have not been filled in. The Department of Commerce’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation is currently taking the lead, but six cabinet agencies are tasked with determining a final process by early August. The White House has explicitly ruled out creating an “FDA for AI.”
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