A standards proposal is not a standard you can buy against yet
OpenAI’s September 21 proposal argues for international technical standards for frontier model capability measurement, risk assessment, safeguards, human oversight, and incident reporting. It says these standards would provide a common technical foundation, not licenses or mandatory prerelease approval. The proposal also identifies incompatible evaluations and incident definitions as a barrier to comparing evidence. That is a policy position from a vendor, not a settled requirement or proof that current reports are comparable.
For a business selecting a model or agent service, the day-to-day version of this problem is familiar: one provider shows a benchmark, another presents a customer story, and a third describes controls without saying which workflow or failure case was tested. If your team cannot tell what each piece of evidence measures, it cannot support a meaningful purchase decision.
Ask for the same fields from each vendor
Create a short evidence packet that uses the same questions for each candidate. Record the intended task, input types, version or model identifier, tools the system can call, human review points, and what happens when the system is uncertain. Ask for test conditions, a description of the tested sample, known limitations, and the date of the evidence. A chart without its task definition or failure criteria is not a useful comparison.
Also request how incidents are classified and routed. What counts as a failed run? Who sees a safety alert? Can the customer inspect enough information to investigate? What action pauses access? These questions need not demand private evaluation data. They establish whether a vendor can explain its process and whether your own team can verify the part that matters.
Keep vendor claims separate from your acceptance test
A vendor packet helps narrow the field; it does not replace a local acceptance test. Use a small set of representative, de-identified examples and define acceptable output before the trial. Include at least one case that should be rejected or routed to a person. Ask the vendor to explain which claims rely on its own evaluations, which were reviewed by others, and what the review actually covered. Do not turn a published score into a forecast of your own results.
This distinction is especially important when the workflow touches customer records, money, deadlines, regulated information, or outbound communication. Your acceptance rule should say what the system may prepare, what it may commit, and where a named employee must decide. Keep the evidence attached to the workflow and version under consideration.
Make comparability useful after procurement
Store the packet with the selection decision and revisit it when the model, tool access, or business process changes. A changed version may alter the test assumptions even if the product name stays the same. Keep a clear owner for revalidation and a simple record of the last known-good configuration. If a provider cannot supply a field, write “not provided” rather than guessing. That gap is itself part of the decision.
The immediate next step is modest: choose one workflow and one vendor question the team cannot currently answer. Build a side-by-side evidence sheet and ask vendors to fill the same fields. This creates a more honest comparison today, while longer-term standards proposals remain proposals.