A group of five Senate Democrats is pressing the Trump administration to establish a transparent, government-wide process for restricting access to frontier artificial intelligence (AI) models.
Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., Adam Schiff, D-Calif., Mark Warner, D-Va., Christopher Coons, D-Del., and Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., sent a letter on Aug. 3 to senior Trump administration officials, asking them to “provide an unclassified response, with a classified annex if necessary, clarifying the Administration’s current policy and approach to limiting access to advanced AI models.”
“The Administration’s ad hoc and unpredictable approach undermines U.S. competitiveness, heightening market incentives to adopt open weight models from vendors based in the People’s Republic of China (PRC),” they wrote.
The letter comes after the Trump administration forced Anthropic to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States. Similarly, the senators said OpenAI also limited public access to its newest model, GPT-5.6, following discussions with the Trump administration.
“If American models are perceived as subject to sudden access disruptions based on a black-box U.S. Government process, or as unreliable because U.S. AI labs are overcorrecting in the face of this black-box process, companies and governments in the United States and abroad may hedge by adopting Chinese or other foreign models instead,” the senators wrote.
They also cited the Trump administration’s June 2 executive order that asks AI companies to voluntarily submit their advanced AI models to the federal government for testing up to 30 days before they plan to release such models to other partners.
Under the order, the administration was tasked with creating a framework to test advanced AI capabilities, but senators said “many questions of implementation remain.”
According to reporting from Axios this week, the White House met its deadline to establish a voluntary framework for evaluating advanced AI models. However, the administration has not publicly said what the framework contains, who has seen it, or when companies will start using it.
“Ultimately, a rigorous, predictable, and competitiveness-enhancing process for evaluating frontier models requires a statutory framework,” the senators wrote. “We encourage the Administration to work with Congress to develop a public, durable, and technically grounded framework that allows U.S. companies and their customers to understand the rules of the road.”
The senators want a response to their letter within 30 days.