Overview
Google, Microsoft, and xAI have joined OpenAI and Anthropic in voluntarily giving the US Commerce Department pre-release access to evaluate their AI models. The five companies now account for the vast majority of frontier AI development worldwide, and all five have agreed to let a single government office test their systems before deployment. The arrangement is voluntary, has no statutory basis, and gives the government no power to block a release. It is also the closest thing the United States has to an AI oversight system, and it was built in less than two years by an office with fewer than two hundred staff.
The office
The Center for AI Standards and Innovation sits within the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology. It was established under President Biden in 2023 as the AI Safety Institute, re-established under Trump with a new name and a reorientation toward standards and national security rather than safety research. The centre has completed more than 40 evaluations of AI models, including state-of-the-art systems that have never been released to the public. Developers frequently submit versions with safety guardrails stripped back so that evaluators can probe for national security-relevant capabilities: biological weapon synthesis pathways, cyberattack automation, and autonomous agent behaviours that could be difficult to control at scale.
Chris Fall now directs the centre, following the abrupt departure of Collin Burns, a former AI researcher at Anthropic who was chosen for the role but pushed out by the White House after four days. Burns had left Anthropic, given up valuable stock, and relocated across the country to take the government position. His removal, reportedly driven by his connection to a company the administration was actively fighting, illustrates the political complexity of building an oversight system for an industry where the evaluators and the evaluated come from the same talent pool.
The agreements
The new partnerships with Google, Microsoft, and xAI expand what had been a two-company arrangement into something closer to comprehensive frontier coverage. OpenAI and Anthropic have renegotiated their existing agreements to align with Trump’s AI Action Plan, which directs the centre to lead national security-related model assessments and positions it as part of a broader “evaluations ecosystem.”
The agreements are not contracts. They are voluntary commitments that the companies can withdraw from at any time. No statute requires pre-release evaluation. No regulation gives the centre authority to delay or block deployment. The entire system depends on the AI companies deciding, for their own strategic reasons, that giving the government early access is preferable to the alternative.
The alternative, from the companies’ perspective, is legislation. Several draft bills would give the centre permanent statutory authority, mandatory evaluation requirements, and the power to impose conditions on deployment. The Pentagon has already demonstrated willingness to blacklist AI companies that refuse