AI Leaders Commit to White House Supported Guidelines

In coordination with the White House, several leaders in the artificial intelligence (AI) space have publicly committed to a voluntary set of guidelines relating to responsible development and deployment of AI. Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI made immediate public commitments focused on safety, security, and transparent development and use of AI technology, including:

• Internal and external red-teaming of models or systems in areas including misuse, societal risks, and national security concerns, such as bio, cyber, and other safety areas.
• Working toward information sharing among companies and governments regarding trust and safety risks, dangerous or emergent capabilities, and attempts to circumvent safeguards.
• Investing in cybersecurity and insider threat safeguards to protect proprietary and unreleased model weights.
• Incentivizing third-party discovery and reporting of issues and vulnerabilities.
• Developing and deploying mechanisms that enable users to understand if audio or visual content is AI-generated, including robust provenance, watermarking, or both, for AI-generated audio or visual content.
• Publicly reporting model or system capabilities, limitations, and domains of appropriate and inappropriate use, including discussion of societal risks, such as effects on fairness and bias.
• Prioritizing research on societal risks posed by AI systems, including on avoiding harmful bias and discrimination, and protecting privacy.
• Developing and deploying frontier AI systems to help address society’s greatest challenges.

The CEOs of Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI met with Vice President Kamala Harris in May 2023. The agreed to AI-safety suggestions correspond with the Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework released by the Department of Commerce in January.

The companies noted that the new commitments would last until regulations covering substantially the same issues are enacted. When federal regulators will do so is an open question. While a draft of the European Union’s AI Act is currently in negotiations between the Council of the EU and its Member States, and the Chinese government recently released a set of generative AI rules, U.S. legislators are still in the information gathering stage and not close to enacting a national AI law. The voluntary commitments are “designed to advance a generative AI legal and policy regime” so they may provide strong guidance as to the subject matter of future regulation that would be supported by the industry, or perhaps forestall regulation, with Congress less inclined to rush legislation if private actors are falling in line on their own. At the very least, commitments by Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI may set the tone for smaller AI companies that haven’t been included in the White House conversations.

Eric S. Ahern, a summer associate in Morrison Foerster’s San Francisco office, contributed to this alert.