The White House's AI framework takes a hands-off approach to open models, raising new questions about how the administration plans to tackle security concerns posed by Chinese labs. The framework is built around voluntary cooperation with AI developers, not labs from adversarial nations. Under the framework, companies can submit closed models voluntarily to the government, which reviews them under agreed-upon security terms. The White House does not plan to publicly release the framework, which explicitly says nothing in it should be interpreted as restricting open models once they've been released. "The covered-model framework is a pre-release cooperation mechanism," said Joseph Hoefer, AI principal at Monument Advocacy. Other tools at the U.S. government's disposal include an executive order considered last year that would allow U.S. companies to host Chinese AI models only if they could guarantee security and accept liability, the Commerce Department weighing the Entity List and supply chain-based restrictions, and an advisory discouraging Chinese model use considered by the National Security Agency and White House Office of the National Cyber Director. Top Trump administration officials have grown louder about Chinese intellectual property theft via distillation. "There's a huge overlap between the best open-source models and the best Chinese models," said Brookings' Kyle Chan. Former Biden White House AI adviser Suresh Venkatasubramanian said the framework's treatment of open models could give Chinese open-source companies a "boost." The administration drew a clear distinction between U.S. open and closed models.