Scoop: Trump AI framework lacks public incident reporting guidelines
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The Trump administration's new AI framework does not include a process for companies to publicly report real-world incidents caused by advanced models before they're released, sources tell Axios.
Why it matters: The Hugging Face breach exposed a significant policy gap in the White House's new plan for overseeing the most powerful AI models.
Behind the scenes: The White House plans to keep its AI framework under wraps, but the select industry players looped into the process also are essentially relying on memory.
- A draft of the framework was shared and industry sent back red lines. The White House then presented the framework in an early-August meeting but did not allow attendees to scan or take pictures of the document.
- That final copy did not include a process for public incident reporting.
The big picture: OpenAI agent hacks into Hugging Face and Germany's Wiki coupled with OpenAI's release of Astra — the first model that reaches its highest cybersecurity risk threshold — are sparking calls for public incident reporting.
- Congress has not passed a law outlining how incidents should be reported, what constitutes an incident, how long investigations should take and which entities should conduct them.
- States have passed laws, but they don't capture what was seen with Hugging Face. Industry also does not have a formal process.
- The EU AI Act requires providers of the most powerful AI models to report serious incidents to regulators.
"The White House continues to work with industry stakeholders on the implementation of the framework," a White House official said.
In addition to a public incident reporting standard, there are various other questions sources said continue to be unanswered for the pre-deployment process, including: how to engage the government, who has access to or reviews the models and how to define covered frontier models.
- "The definition is basically the government saying to industry 'you know when you're making a new a new frontier model, you know what I mean' — that's basically how it works," one source said.
