Seven leading AI companies in the US have agreed to voluntary safeguards on the technology’s development, the White House announced on Friday, pledging to manage the risks of the new tools even as they compete over the potential of artificial intelligence.
The seven companies — Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI — will formally announce their commitment to new standards in the areas of safety, security and trust at a meeting with President Joe Biden at the White House on Friday afternoon.
The announcement comes as the companies are racing to outdo each other with versions of AI that offer powerful new ways to create text, photos, music and video without human input. But the technological leaps have prompted fears about the spread of disinformation and dire warnings of a “risk of extinction” as self-aware computers evolve.
The voluntary safeguards are only an early, tentative step as Washington and governments across the world rush to put in place legal and regulatory frameworks for AI.
They reflect an urgency by the Biden administration and lawmakers to respond to the rapidly evolving technology, even as lawmakers have struggled to regulate social media and other technologies.
The White House offered no details of a forthcoming presidential executive order that will deal with a bigger problem: How to control the ability of China and other competitors to get ahold of the new AI programmes.
