It was a big announcement for a tiny part of the Commerce Department.
On May 5, the Center for AI Standards said it got early access to three of the country’s most powerful AI models before their public release. It could poke and prod and size up just how big of a threat they could pose to national security – and to the US public.
CAISI had already struck similar voluntary agreements with OpenAI and Anthropic, so the new deals with Google, Microsoft and xAI rounded out the list of the top American AI companies. The public notice was seen as an important and logical step in the long and lumbering process of monitoring and potentially regulating the most powerful technology the world has ever seen.
It wouldn’t last. The announcement was quietly deleted from the agency’s website a few days later at the White House’s request, who told the group it would conflict with an executive order on AI President Trump planned to sign, sources familiar with the situation told CNN.
Meanwhile, AI was plotting a jailbreak.
