Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Meet Since July on AI Standards Body

The three US labs racing hardest on frontier AI have been talking to each other about how to police themselves. Anthropic, OpenAI and Google have held working-group meetings since July to discuss creating an industry-led standards body for AI, The Information's Leo Schwartz reported, citing sources familiar with the discussions.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is driving the push. Sam Altman is backing it. The initiative "led by Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei, aims to establish a framework for technical testing and auditing in the AI sector," the reporting says, with Altman emphasizing the need for major AI labs to "create a standards body independently, especially in the absence of government support."

The three CEOs converge on a single diagnosis, that frontier models should face outside scrutiny before public release, and part ways on who holds the pen. As Axios laid out in July, Amodei's model is an FAA for AI: a federal agency with the power to block a model's release from Day 1. Hassabis wants a FINRA for AI, "an industry-funded, federally overseen standards body that starts with voluntary pre-release reviews and could harden into mandatory market-access rules." Altman, writing in the Financial Times, has pushed an IAEA for AI, a U.S.-led international forum that certifies countries, companies and safety standards.

The three-way agreement is narrower than the shared talking points suggest. Anthropic has leaned toward government partnership; OpenAI has leaned toward voluntary industry rules. OpenAI and Anthropic have separately been pushing the Trump administration to adopt "a consistent federal review process for the most powerful AI models," a bar that would apply to rivals like Meta and Elon Musk's xAI.

Washington is moving in parallel. Schwartz previously reported that some Trump administration officials circulated a draft EO to create a self-regulatory organization for AI, though it still needs buy-in from Trump and others. The private talks land the same week a Senate draft put a 'duty of care' on frontier AI builders, one of a run of stories on our regulation tracker this week.