Telegraph: White House reverses course and lets US labs again give the UK AI Security Institute pre-release access to new models

On Sept 24, Politico reported that the White House Office of the National Cyber Director had asked OpenAI and Anthropic to hold new models back from the UK AI Security Institute until US agencies had reviewed them. On Oct 11, the Telegraph reported that the administration had dropped that request. Reuters relayed the report and called it a sign of “a softer stance by the Trump administration on international AI safety efforts”. According to GB News’s account of the Telegraph article, UK AI minister Kanishka Narayan had lobbied for the change, and the institute will receive pre-release models from Anthropic, Google DeepMind and OpenAI.

The report appeared hours before Narayan’s Oct 12 speech on AI safety and cyber defences, and in the same days in which Microsoft president Brad Smith told the BBC that the UK is the country best placed to lead global AI safety rules.

This entry is written from Reuters, GB News and Techmeme’s summary. The Telegraph article itself could not be opened.

Pre-release testing by the UK institute was one of the few working international safety checks on frontier models, and its suspension in September was read as the US treating those models as national assets. Restoring it, together with the Oct 9 incident reporting statement, is a change in the administration’s position after a series of agent incidents.