Every CEO, board, and middle manager in the world is AI buzzword-obsessed now. Surely asking to sign a contract with the frontier labs directly would not get held up?

Every CEO, board, and middle manager in the world still has to go through infosec in large orgs.

The hard part is not the CEO, it's the CISO

If you're an engineer in the trenches of the company, good luck convincing the people above to sign that contract. You'll waste thousands of hours just trying.