The White House is in advanced talks with OpenAI, Anthropic and Google to finalize a voluntary regime for how frontier AI models are tested, released, and distributed at home and abroad, the Financial Times reported Wednesday, with an announcement possible within the week. The framework would set capability benchmarks, staged release timelines, and rules for who inside and outside the United States gets access.

It’s the operational scaffolding for President Donald Trump’s June 2 executive order, “Promoting Advanced Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Security,” which asked developers of “covered frontier models” to submit them for federal benchmarking up to 30 days before release. The order pointedly stopped short of mandatory licensing. What’s being negotiated now is what “voluntary” means in practice.

The recent record suggests the answer is: quite a lot. Last week, OpenAI delayed the full public launch of GPT-5.6 at the government’s request, limiting access to vetted partners. The Commerce Department, meanwhile, lifted export controls on Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos models on Tuesday, less than three weeks after ordering their suspension on national security grounds. Reuters couldn’t immediately verify the FT report, and the White House, OpenAI and Anthropic didn’t respond to requests for comment.

According to The Next Web, Microsoft, Google and xAI have agreed in principle to pre-release testing, leaving Meta as the last major holdout. A person familiar with the matter told Reuters Google’s participation is tied to an unreleased advanced coding model.

Sam Altman, posting on X, offered the industry’s tell. “I think it is quite reasonable to roll out models — especially as they reach significant new levels of capability — in this way,” he wrote, while making clear he doesn’t “like the idea of the government picking the customers.” That’s the deal in a sentence: assent to the gate, resist the guest list. It echoes the 2023 voluntary White House AI commitments, minus the pretense that “voluntary” and “conditional market access” are different things.

Sources