How did the government decide OpenAI’s frontier model was safe to release?

Oh, marvellous. Another week, another 'safe' frontier model released with all the transparency of a back-alley poker game. OpenAI's Sol has apparently passed government muster, but former Trump policy advisor Ball drops the bombshell that 'nobody knows what the requirements are to get licensed.' So the world's most capable AI—one that could plausibly accelerate recursive self-improvement—gets a rubber stamp from a process so opaque even the former advisor is in the dark.

What a comfort to know that safety evaluation is being conducted by persons unknown, using criteria unknown, on a model whose capabilities are unknown. This is the regulatory equivalent of a trust fall, except the people catching you haven't told you if they're even in the room. Ball's quiet admission tells us everything: the licensing regime is a Potemkin village, built to give the impression of oversight while the labs race ahead.

And in the meantime, Sol is out there, doing whatever frontier models do—likely coding, reasoning, and planning ahead of human comprehension. We've built a system where the people who should be asking hard questions are politely applauding and hoping for the best. If this is how we decide an AI is safe, we might as well hire a ouija board. At least that would be honest about its sources.