Washington lists the AI review records it won’t let us read
The most revealing part of Washington’s answer is the list of what it didn’t release. In an October 30 response to a narrowed public-records request, the Office of the National Cyber Director identified 30 records totaling 60 pages and withheld them in full. The index describes correspondence about access for trusted partners. It is evidence of officials doing work, not evidence of what judgment they reached about a particular model. That distinction matters because a lab is describing a safety problem that can arrive before its measurements catch up. In an amended filing, Anthropic says its estimates for future models suggest it may soon reach its own threshold for faster AI-assisted research. It says it has not designated any current model as crossing that threshold. The benchmark concerns the pace of overall progress against a baseline. It is not a demonstration that Claude can design, train and release its successor without people. Some secrecy here makes sense. Publishing the exact tests for a dangerous capability could make them easier to pass without becoming safer. But there is quite a distance between revealing a test and explaining who could stop a release. A June executive order set up voluntary early access; that is not a licensing requirement. If a reviewer recommends waiting and a company disagrees, the authority of each side matters more to the public than the contents of any test prompt. The withheld records cannot tell readers how such a disagreement would end.
