Top Tech Companies Pledge Not to Be Reckless With Their AI Tools

The White House has reached a voluntary agreement with the top tech companies to prevent their AI technologies from wreaking havoc on society.

The Biden administration announced(Opens in a new window) the agreement today amid growing fears that generative AI programs could fuel misinformation and take jobs away from humans.

Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection AI, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI have agreed to have independent experts test their AI programs for safety before public release. They will also develop ways to essentially watermark AI-generated content to prevent the public from falling for deepfakes and other AI-created misinformation.

The companies also vowed to invest in cybersecurity to guard against their proprietary AI code, including the model weights, from being stolen or leaked to the public. 

“These commitments, which the companies have chosen to undertake immediately, underscore three principles that must be fundamental to the future of AI —safety, security, and trust,” the White House says.

But other aspects of the agreement stop short of regulating the AI programs. For example, the White House says the seven companies will research the risks of AI, “including on avoiding harmful bias and discrimination, and protecting privacy.” But there’s no mention of the same companies refraining from scraping public data to train their AI models—a practice that’s drawing regulatory scrutiny from the FTC and is the subject of several lawsuits.

Sen. Mark Warner, chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a statement that AI vendors “frequently talk about their commitment to security and safety, [but] we have repeatedly seen the expedited release of products that are exploitable, prone to generating unreliable outputs, and susceptible to misuse.

“These commitments are a step in the right direction, but, as I have said before, we need more than industry commitments,” Sen. Warner added. “We also need some degree of regulation.”

President Biden is meeting with executives of all seven tech companies on Friday to announce the voluntary agreements. But the White House also views the commitments as a first step.

“There is much more work underway. The Biden-Harris Administration is currently developing an executive order and will pursue bipartisan legislation to help America lead the way in responsible innovation,” the announcement adds. 

In a blog post(Opens in a new window), Google called the voluntary agreements a “milestone in bringing the industry together to ensure that AI helps everyone.” The company will soon be “integrating watermarking(Opens in a new window), metadata, and other innovative techniques within Google’s programs to help users identify AI-created images over the company’s search products. 

Meanwhile, OpenAI said: “These voluntary commitments are consistent with existing laws and regulations, and designed to advance a generative AI legal and policy regime. Companies intend these voluntary commitments to remain in effect until regulations covering substantially the same issues come into force.”