In a meeting on Tuesday with top artificial intelligence companies, White House officials said the federal government planned to review only certain types of artificial intelligence models for potential security risks and not others, according to four people familiar with the discussions.
The A.I. models the government plans to review are known as “closed” models, which do not publish their underlying code and are made by companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, three of the people said.
But the administration said it did not plan to review “open source” A.I. models, which have computer code available to the public to download and modify, although that could change as the technology advances. American companies including Nvidia, Meta and Google, make open-source models, as do Chinese firms such as Alibaba, DeepSeek and Moonshot AI.
Among those in attendance at the meeting were representatives from Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, Google and Nvidia, according to two of the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the details of the meeting were private. The White House solicited feedback from the companies, but the rules governing the A.I. reviews are almost complete, said one of the people.
The moves, which are an effort by the Trump administration to take a more hands-on approach to regulating A.I., formalize oversight of leading A.I. labs like OpenAI and Anthropic. But they delay some of the most pressing regulatory issues with the technology, including potential threats posed by increasingly powerful open-source models made by Chinese companies.
The decision to exclude open-source models could also be a boon for companies that are trying to catch up to Anthropic and OpenAI, which are widely considered leaders in developing next-generation A.I. Some companies, like Meta, have used open-source software to create products to directly compete with the two leading start-ups.
The framework, which comes after months of private discussions between administration officials and a handful of the world’s most consequential tech companies, is likely to shape the global A.I. race.
President Trump started his second term as a booster of A.I., painting his support as necessary for the United States to stay ahead of China. He has urged little regulation and cultivated relationships with top A.I. companies and billionaires invested in the technology.
But his stance has shifted amid broader concerns that A.I. could spike power prices, lead to job losses and expose major institutions to sophisticated cyberattacks. In June, Mr. Trump signed an executive order giving the government oversight over new advanced models, resulting in the framework previewed to tech companies on Tuesday.
The framework governing the reviews of the A.I. models, one of the most significant federal efforts to oversee a fast-evolving technology, will not be made public, the people said.
The White House did not have immediate comment.
OpenAI and Anthropic have also recently disclosed incidents in which their models escaped from testing environments and hacked other companies, adding urgency within the administration to review the models for security.
On Tuesday, OpenAI said in a blog post that it had discovered more instances of its models carrying out smaller cyber attacks. The incidents occurred when OpenAI’s technology was being tested by other organizations, including a company the A.I. lab uses to do cybersecurity testing and Britain’s AI Security Institute. That institute also tested models from Anthropic and found that they, too, attempted to hack other organizations, it said in a blog post.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The companies have denied those claims.)