White House to meet AI firms on advanced model safety

The administration of United States President Donald Trump is set to meet with the country’s top artificial intelligence companies to discuss allowing the federal government more safety tests for its most advanced models amid two high-profile hackings confirmed by Anthropic and OpenAI.

The meeting is set to take place on Tuesday, a White House official told Al Jazeera.

The meeting is part of a June 2 executive order that called for a new voluntary framework that would allow the federal government to have early access to advanced models for up to 30 days before public release, it said.

The meeting is underscored by developments last week when OpenAI tools were responsible for a breach at a tech company, Hugging Face, and at the client of another, Modal Labs. The tools’ hacking incidents were operating outside of the purview of what they were designed to do.

This comes amid claims by CEO Sam Altman on a podcast, following the Hugging Face attack, that the technology has reached “the singularity”, when AI surpasses human intelligence and becomes harder to control. He had previously said this would not be reached by 2030.

Last week, Altman met with other lawmakers on Capitol Hill, including Bernie Moreno, a Republican from Ohio, and Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock.

Altman also visited the White House at the time to discuss the tests.

On Monday, 15 state attorneys general, all Republicans, including those from Florida, Iowa and Kansas, called on OpenAI to maintain documents on how its AI system escaped containment.