Google, OpenAI and Anthropic are building their own AI regulator, with no government in it

The three companies building the world's most powerful AI models are moving to set the safety rules those models must meet — and, according to reports, to do it without a government in the room.

Google, OpenAI and Anthropic are said to be working on a voluntary standards body for frontier AI, tentatively named around 'Frontier AI Standards'. It would focus on testing and auditing: third-party pre-deployment safety checks, incident-reporting rules, and qualification standards for the auditors who do the checking.

How It Got Here

The design has a specific model and a specific history.

The idea, floated publicly by Google DeepMind's chief executive over the summer, is patterned on the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority — the body that regulates Wall Street brokers. That is a self-regulatory organisation: an industry polices itself under a structure the government recognises but does not run.

Notably, the labs did not start here. They initially sought a public-private partnership under federal oversight, and pivoted to pure industry self-regulation only after a White House executive order on frontier-model standards stalled. Self-regulation is, in part, what is left when the government route closes.

The Case For It

There is a real argument for this, and it should not be dismissed as a fig leaf.

Frontier AI moves faster than any legislature can, and the people who understand these systems best work at the labs. A standards body that can write and revise concrete testing frameworks in months, rather than the years a statute takes, may produce more useful safety practice than waiting for a law that keeps stalling. Some standard, arriving soon, can beat a better one that never comes.

The Obvious Problem

The obvious problem is just as real, and it is structural.

This is the industry writing its own rules and grading its own homework. A self-regulator funded and staffed by the companies it oversees has a built-in incentive to set standards its members can comfortably meet, and to keep them there. When the product in question may pose serious public risk, 'trust us to regulate ourselves' is a hard sell — and it is being made by exactly the companies with the most to gain from light rules.

The Wall Street comparison cuts both ways here. That self-regulatory model exists in finance, but it operates under an actual government regulator with enforcement power sitting above it. A frontier-AI body with no government layer at all is a weaker arrangement than the model it borrows from.

What Is Really Being Decided

The deeper issue is who gets to make the rules for a technology this consequential, and this is the question the arrangement quietly answers.

If the standards body succeeds, it may also make binding public regulation harder to argue for — 'the industry already handles this' is a familiar reason to hold legislation back. A voluntary body can be genuine safety infrastructure, and it can also be a way to occupy the regulatory space before a government does. It is difficult, from outside, to be sure which this is, and it may be both.

What To Watch

Whether the body launches on its reported timeline of late 2026 or 2027, and who exactly funds and staffs it. Whether its standards have any teeth — real consequences for a member that fails a safety test — or are advisory. And whether governments treat it as a complement to public regulation or, as the labs might prefer, a substitute for it.