President Joe Biden speaks during a meeting with artificial intelligence experts and researchers at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco on June 20, 2023.
Jane Teska | Media News Corp | Getty Images
Seven top artificial intelligence companies, including Google, Microsoft and OpenAI are meeting at the White House on Friday, promising to create ways for consumers to identify AI-generated material and to test the safety of their tools before releasing them publicly.
amazonanthropic, inflected and Yuan Refine your pool of potential attendees. All seven companies agreed on Friday to make a series of voluntary commitments to develop artificial intelligence technology.
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Commitments include:
- Develop a method for consumers to identify AI-generated content, for example through watermarking.
- Have independent experts evaluate the security of their tools before releasing them to the public.
- Share information on best practices and attempts to circumvent security measures with other industry players, governments, and external experts.
- Allow third parties to find and report vulnerabilities in their systems.
- Report the limitations of their techniques and guide the appropriate use of AI tools.
- Prioritize research on the societal risks of AI, including discrimination and privacy concerns.
- The goal of developing artificial intelligence is to help alleviate societal challenges such as climate change and disease.
Safety has become a top concern in the AI world since OpenAI released ChatGPT late last year, which can reply to simple text input with complex, creative conversational responses. Top tech companies and investors are pouring billions of dollars into the massive language models behind so-called generative artificial intelligence.
The potential power of this technology is so great that major players in the field have expressed public concern about moving too quickly. In an open letter in May, industry experts and leaders wrote that “mitigating extinction risks posed by artificial intelligence should become a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
The latest pledge is part of President Biden’s efforts to ensure that artificial intelligence is developed with appropriate safeguards without hindering innovation. Congress is considering rules on artificial intelligence, although implementing standards could take months or years as lawmakers continue to learn from experts on how the technology works and the associated risks involved.
Executives scheduled to attend Friday’s White House meeting include Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google global affairs chief Kent Walker, Inflection CEO Mustafa Suleyman, Meta global affairs chief Nick Clegg, Microsoft president Brad Smith and OpenAI president Greg Brockman.
The Biden administration says it has consulted with many other countries on voluntary commitments and is working to ensure they complement the international community’s efforts in erecting guardrails around the technology.
U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo called the latest pledge “the bride of regulation” in an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Friday.
“It will take a while for Congress to pass a law regulating AI,” Raimondo said. “But to his credit, the president also knows we don’t have time. AI is developing so fast, faster than any technology we’ve ever seen.”
Raimondo called the commitment a “first step” but an important one.
“These companies are committed to true transparency, working with third parties to test models, working with the U.S. government to test models and share information,” she said. “Don’t underestimate the power of that transparency and the fact that they know we care and their customers care, hold them accountable.”
The US still lacks national digital privacy protections and has been slow to regulate emerging technologies. Raimondo said AI is a separate category and the administration is committed to working with Congress.
“We can’t afford to wait for this,” Raimondo said. “AI is different. Like the power of AI, the potential, strengths, and weaknesses of AI are things we’ve never seen before.”
Vice President Kamala Harris has previously hosted AI chief executives as well as labor and civil liberties experts to weigh in on the challenges AI poses.
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