America’s top AI companies must submit new models for government review and public release… unless, of course, they don’t feel like it. That appears to be the gist of the Trump administration’s new AI safety assessment framework, which was shared with industry leaders in a closed-door briefing at the White House on Tuesday. According to the Wall Street Journal, the new rules will apply exclusively to the small handful of American AI developers building proprietary models—i.e., AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini whose underlying code is hidden from external developers and protected as company IP. Anyone building open models will be exempt, meaning they’ll be free to release new models without any government review (the idea apparently being that because they’re open, any flaws in the code will be ironed out as they spread from one developer to another). The new framework has not been made public—Trump’s June 02 executive order calling for it explicitly said it should be classified—so there are many unanswered questions. For example, what’s the process for determining whether or not an unreleased model is dangerous enough to warrant federal review? But the most obvious open question is: How exactly will these so-called rules have any meaningful bite to them when the entire process is voluntary? The short answer is: They probably won’t. Trump, who began his second term as a hard-liner against regulating AI, has been under growing pressure in recent months to change course as one rogue AI cybersecurity scare after another has spooked tech leaders and governments around the world.