Senators at the Sept. 17 hearing pressed White House OSTP Director Michael Kratios for concrete enforcement of the administration’s procurement standards that require federally procured AI models to be "truth seeking and accurate." Several senators cited examples of large language models producing hate speech and asked whether those models should be disqualified from federal contracts.

"The president wrote about it explicitly in the woke AI executive order," Kratios said, referring to executive‑branch procurement guidance directing the Office of Management and Budget to craft standards for models the federal government buys. Kratios told the committee that the guidance is under development and that procurement rules could carry "pretty harsh" repercussions for models that fail to meet the standard.

Multiple senators raised a named model deployed in government procurement that they said has generated racist and antisemitic outputs and asked whether procurement policy had been followed in those purchases. Kratios repeated that the administration will apply the executive order's standard and said NIST will be central to developing metrology and evaluation methods. "My number one priority for NIST would be to work on the very hard science associated with model evaluation and metrology," he told the committee.

Lawmakers sought a clearer timetable. Senator Markey asked whether Kratios knew how much household electricity bills would rise from data center expansion; Kratios replied he was "not familiar" with that figure. Other senators explicitly pressed for timely release of OMB and agency procurement guidance so agencies could apply the "truth seeking" standard when awarding contracts.

Kratios also emphasized the administration's interest in encouraging multiple model builders and open‑source work so the marketplace can produce a diversity of models. "One of the reasons we emphasize open source models is to encourage more players in the marketplace," he said. He added that independent model evaluation, improved NIST standards, and federal procurement rules will be complementary tools to reduce risks from model outputs.

No formal timetable beyond the announcement that procurement guidance is in development was provided at the hearing; Kratios said the interagency process to define what constitutes a "truth‑seeking and accurate" model is underway.