AI Firms Strike Deal With White House on Safety Guidelines

July 21, 2023

The White House announced that the Biden administration had reached a voluntary agreement with seven companies building artificial intelligence products to establish guidelines meant to ensure the technology is developed safely.

“These commitments are real, and they’re concrete,” President Joe Biden said in comments to reporters. “They’re going to help … the industry fulfill its fundamental obligation to Americans to develop safe, secure and trustworthy technologies that benefit society and uphold our values and our shared values.”

The companies that sent leaders to the White House were Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI. The firms are all developing systems called large language models (LLMs), which are trained using vast amounts of text, usually taken from the publicly accessible internet, and use predictive analysis to respond to queries conversationally...

“No one knows how to regulate AI — it’s very complex and is constantly changing,” said Susan Ariel Aaronson, a professor at George Washington University and the founder and director of the research institute Digital Trade and Data Governance Hub.

“The White House is trying very hard to regulate in a pro-innovative way,” Aaronson told VOA. “When you regulate, you always want to balance risk — protecting people or businesses from harm — with encouraging innovation, and this industry is essential for U.S. economic growth.”

Read the full article on VOA.