Pre-release testing of frontier AI models has so far rested on a loose set of voluntary arrangements. Labs share early versions with government testers, the testers probe them for risk, and the results inform both the companies and the public officials watching them. That model assumed allies would cooperate. A new request from Washington suggests the order of access now matters as much as access itself.
According to a report by Politico, the White House has asked OpenAI and Anthropic to hold back new models from the UK's AI Security Institute (AISI) until the US government has completed its own review. The request came from the Office of the National Cyber Director.
Most safety checks on frontier AI models have so far been brief. An outside group gets access shortly before launch, runs its tests, and the model ships. That approach can catch obvious problems. It is less useful for judging whether a company's safety claims hold up across training, testing and real-world deployment.
OpenAI now wants to change that picture. In a framework titled "Priorities and principles for effective third party assessments," the company sets out how independent reviewers could get far deeper access to the way its models are built, evaluated and used. The idea is that assessors verify safety claims themselves rather than taking the company's word for it, and form their own view on whether safeguards actually work.
Most of the debate about AI-generated text has focused on what these systems can write. Less attention goes to a quieter question: whether anyone can later tell that a machine wrote it. Anthropic has now given its answer for a larger part of its Claude lineup.
From 30 September 2026, the company will apply its previously announced text watermark to three more models: Claude Fable 5, Claude Sonnet 5 and Claude Opus 4.8. Anthropic shared the news with customers by email. Its stated reason is compliance with the transparency requirements of the EU AI Act.
Google DeepMind's new leader has a clear priority, and it is not artificial general intelligence. Koray Kavukcuoglu wants Gemini 4 out well before the end of the year. He has also made it plain that he sees little value in arguing over whether AGI has already arrived.
Kavukcuoglu made his first media appearance as head of Google DeepMind at The Information's AI Agenda Live Summit. There, he described Gemini 4 as being in an early phase of post-training, the stage where a base model is refined so that it behaves reliably. He said he hopes to release it considerably earlier than year-end.
Most AI announcements are about the model itself: a new release, a better benchmark score, a lower price. Anthropic's latest news is different. It is about what the model found in biological data, and about who did the physical lab work that followed.
Only a week after confirming that it runs a wet biology lab in the Bay Area, Anthropic said the lab had already produced what the company considers a significant result. It describes the find as a new enzyme "system" with "properties reminiscent of CRISPR."
What was found: an enzyme system hidden in viral DNA
CRISPR began as a natural immune system in bacteria, which use it to defend themselves against viruses. Researchers later turned it into a gene-editing technology, and it is now widely used in labs.
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