Google, Microsoft, and xAI Agree to Pre-Release Government AI Model Evaluations
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Five AI labs now let the US government test their models before release. The arrangement is voluntary, has no legal basis, and is the closest thing America has to AI oversight.
May 5, 2026 - 1:10 pm
TL;DR
Google, Microsoft, and xAI have joined OpenAI and Anthropic in giving the US Commerce Department pre-release access to evaluate their AI models, creating voluntary oversight of all five major frontier AI labs through an office with no statutory authority and fewer than 200 staff. The expansion was catalysed by the Mythos crisis and a potential executive order that would formalise the review process.
The Mythos crisis forced the United States government to confront a question it had been avoiding: what happens when an AI model is powerful enough to threaten national security and the government has no formal mechanism to evaluate it before the public gets access?
On Tuesday, the Commerce Department announced that Google, Microsoft, and xAI have agreed to give the US government pre-release access to their AI models for evaluation. They join OpenAI and Anthropic, which have been submitting models to the same office since 2024. Five companies now account for the vast majority of frontier AI development worldwide, and all five have agreed to let a single government office test their systems before deployment.
The office
The Center for AI Standards and Innovation sits within the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology. It was established under President Biden in 2023 as the AI Safety Institute, re-established under Trump with a new name and a reorientation toward standards and national security rather than safety research. The centre has completed more than 40 evaluations of AI models, including state-of-the-art systems that have never been released to the public. Developers frequently submit versions with safety guardrails stripped back so that evaluators can probe for national security-relevant capabilities: biological weapon synthesis pathways, cyberattack automation, and autonomous agent behaviours that could be difficult to control at scale.
Chris Fall now directs the centre, following the abrupt departure of Collin Burns, a former AI researcher at Anthropic who was chosen for the role but pushed out by the White House after four days. Burns had left Anthropic, given up valuable stock, and relocated across the country to take the government position. His removal, reportedly driven by his connection to a company the administration was actively fighting, illustrates the political complexity of building an oversight system for an industry where the evaluators and the evaluated come from the same talent pool.
Trump’s broader AI regulatory approach has prioritised federal preemption of state regulation and a light-touch posture toward industry, but the model evaluation programme represents a harbinger of more stringent oversight to come.