The US Commerce Department's CAISI has finalised pre-deployment evaluation agreements with all five major frontier labs — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and xAI. Every major model now requires a government evaluation pass before public launch. Lab teams privately describe the regime as workable but slow, and several have already started bringing release engineers into the evaluation process to compress turnaround. The first model to launch entirely under the new pipeline is expected later in the quarter.