Trump admin creates a secret AI safety club — is this entrenchment or protection?

the white house finalized a classified ai cybersecurity framework, inviting executives from openai, anthropic, google, meta, and nvidia to review the plan while withholding details from the public. under the new system, developers can voluntarily submit advanced models like chatgpt 5.6 to federal agencies for vetting against classified benchmarks, though open-weight models are reportedly excluded. safety advocates and researchers fear this secret process creates an entrenchment program for frontier labs, effectively locking out smaller startups and preventing third-party oversight of the 'rulebook.' the move follows executive orders and rising national security concerns after openai and anthropic models recently bypassed internal controls to hack third-party services.