OpenAI is rolling out Sol, its latest frontier model, for wide public access after a US government review that nobody outside a small circle of officials and executives can describe. The model is considered at least on par with Anthropic's Fable, which was briefly pulled from wider access earlier this year over jailbreak concerns and a personality clash with the White House. Eighteen months into the Trump administration, there is still no published standard for what a frontier model must clear before shipping.
The Department of Commerce's Center for AI Standards and Innovation is leading the ad hoc process for now. An executive order published last month sets an early-August deadline for six cabinet agencies to agree on a formal evaluation framework, but the specifics remain undefined. The one thing officials have ruled out is a dedicated regulator: Sriram Krishnan, who served as senior advisor for AI in the White House until last month after joining from Andreessen Horowitz, told the Financial Times there will be no FDA-equivalent for AI.
Researchers who track federal AI policy say they cannot audit what actually happened before Sol shipped. Mina Narayanan, a senior research analyst at Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology, said Anthropic acknowledged conversations with the government around Fable and described defense-in-depth measures including a jailbreak classifier, but the actual back-and-forth between the labs and federal officials is not public.
Key facts
- 01OpenAI's Sol reached public release after an opaque federal review; no agency has published the criteria used to clear it.
- 02An executive order last month tasked six cabinet agencies with defining a frontier-model evaluation process by early August 2026.
- 03Sam Altman reportedly offered up to 5% of OpenAI's equity to the administration's 'Trump Accounts,' complicating the optics of a light-touch review.
- 04Anthropic's Fable was briefly pulled from wider access after the US government blocked foreign-national use over jailbreak concerns.
- 05The Department of Commerce's Center for AI Standards and Innovation is currently leading review efforts, but Sriram Krishnan said 'there will not be an FDA for AI.'
Dean W. Ball, a former Trump policy advisor who now works for OpenAI, wrote in a newsletter last month that nobody knows what the requirements are to get licensed. Sam Altman told CNBC that OpenAI's conversations included Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and national cyber director Sean Cairncross, but neither the experts who tested Sol nor their methodology have been disclosed.
OpenAI declined to share details of the government's process, pointing instead to Sol's safety card, which cites external evaluations from the UK AI Safety Institute, SecureBio, and Irregular. The company previewed Sol for the government and select outside users before wider release, mirroring the Fable rollout, but the identity of those users and how they were selected has not been made public. In a late-June blog post, OpenAI said it does not believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default.
“There will not be an FDA for AI”— Sriram Krishnan, Former White House senior advisor for AI
The political backdrop is hard to disentangle from the review. Altman has reportedly offered as much as 5% of OpenAI's equity to the administration's Trump Accounts program, and OpenAI president Greg Brockman is the largest publicly known donor to Trump's mid-term political operation. Anthropic's Fable, by contrast, was briefly restricted after the government forbade its use by foreign nationals, partly over jailbreak-enabled hacking capabilities and partly due to friction between Anthropic's leadership and the administration.
Andy Konwinski, who co-founded Databricks and Perplexity and now runs the Laude Institute, said he has yet to meet anyone — including inside frontier labs — who can describe the release process end-to-end. He argues that the current setup concentrates decision-making in a small number of firms and a handful of officials, with almost no visibility for the broader research community.
Konwinski wants something closer to an open commons, modeled on the FDA, NIH, or the national labs, where government, industry, and independent researchers reach consensus on safety questions. He worries that alignment researchers, interpretability researchers, and data specialists are not meaningfully part of the release decision today. Ball, writing from inside OpenAI, has proposed a different route: third-party auditing organizations licensed by the government to evaluate frontier labs' safety practices.
The economics push against transparency. Ball has noted that AI companies need to recoup training costs quickly, before competitors close the gap, which creates pressure to ship fast and share little. Konwinski points out that legal obligations and fiduciary duties are baked into how these companies operate, regardless of individual intent. Meanwhile, University of Wisconsin-Madison computer scientist Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau said at last week's Open Frontier conference that there is no sense responsible people are driving the current changes.
At the same event, Two Sigma founder David Siegel described what he called a very bad situation — a small number of firms controlling the technology, the government evaluating it in secretive laboratories, and neither the public nor the scientific community having meaningful access. For Sol, that description already fits the facts on the record.
The immediate market implication is asymmetric leverage. Labs with strong personal ties to the administration face a lighter, faster path to release; labs without those ties face export restrictions and pulled launches, as Anthropic did with Fable. That asymmetry will shape which US models reach customers first, which foreign markets they can serve, and how aggressively competitors invest in Washington relationships versus safety infrastructure. Until the early-August deadline produces an actual framework — and possibly well after — the release of the most consequential software in the industry will run on private phone calls and unpublished criteria.
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