Anthropic, OpenAI and Google have been meeting privately since July on a joint AI standards body

Working groups of below-CEO executives from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google have met regularly since July to discuss forming a joint AI standards body, The Information's Leo Schwartz reported September 13. The group met as recently as the week before publication. The proposal centers on shared protocols for testing frontier models before public release: independent evaluations, pre-release safety reviews and standardized risk assessments all three labs would submit to.

Older than the public pledge

These talks predate Dario Amodei's September 12 "We Must Pace the Frontier" essay, which Altman and Musk endorsed within hours and which this site covered separately. The catalyst was a July essay from Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis proposing a US-led standards body modeled on FINRA, the securities industry's self-regulatory organization. The public pledge that made headlines last weekend sits on two months of private coordination the companies hadn't disclosed. Amodei's essay was the visible part of a plan already partly built.

Where the labs disagree

The reporting says the companies aren't aligned on what the body should be. Sam Altman said at an internal town hall that he backs a testing-and-auditing organization but thinks the major labs will have to build it themselves, without US government backing. Anthropic has pushed for closer coordination with government. Google has floated the FINRA comparison: a body with regulatory teeth beyond voluntary norms. None of that is resolved.

The industry has tried this before. The 2023 Frontier Model Forum and the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation, launched in December 2025, both attempted cross-company AI safety coordination. The open question is whether a body designed and funded by the three biggest labs sets an independent bar, or one that incumbents clear more easily than smaller competitors.