Google, OpenAI, Anthropic Court Sriram Krishnan for AI Safety Body

Google, OpenAI and Anthropic have approached Sriram Krishnan, the former Senior White House Policy Advisor on Artificial Intelligence, to serve as chief executive of what is tentatively called the Frontier AI Standards Agency, The Information reported. The three biggest frontier labs want to build their own regulator, and they want the job run by a man who spent his time in office arguing Washington should not build one.

Krishnan served in the second Trump administration from January 2025 until June 2026. On the way out he said 'there will not be an FDA for AI,' arguing that a centralised agency requiring 'a team of lawyers before you can get a model out' would put 'sand in the gears' of the AI revolution.

The proposed body is modeled on Wall Street's FINRA. OpenAI Chief Global Affairs Officer Chris Lehane confirmed on September 15 in a Washington briefing that the three labs had been coordinating on safety protocols for several weeks. Lehane said no antitrust waiver was needed and endorsed a FRONTIER Act provision requiring 'independent verification organizations' inside frontier labs. Google DeepMind chair Demis Hassabis initiated the talks in July, proposing a U.S.-led oversight body to vet cutting-edge AI models and trigger industrywide slowdowns when threats emerged.

The scope on the table is concrete: assessment protocols, third-party safety tests before model deployment, incident-reporting rules, and testing with federal agencies and the U.S. National Labs in areas relevant to national security. Vendor participants would be encouraged to publish model cards with technical details, maintain strong internal cybersecurity, vet key personnel, and adequately resource safety and security research.

Not everyone is buying it. Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez called the proposal 'a cartel by any other name,' drawing parallels to the SEC's 1975 NRSRO designation and Europe's 1985 Motor Vehicle Block Exemption, and warning such a body would entrench incumbents while raising barriers for smaller competitors and open-source developers. Anthropic and Google have not publicly confirmed the specific coordination to reporters, leaving the initiative in what has been described as strategic ambiguity. It lands the same week Carney and Macron pushed for a global Technology Stability Board, two competing answers to who watches the frontier arriving in the same news cycle.