OpenAI backs bipartisan House plan for third-party safety assessments
Por Brendan Bordelon — POLITICO – TOP Stories
Artificial intelligence giant OpenAI is supporting a bipartisan House proposal that would require top AI companies to embed outside evaluators to ensure their models are safe.
Chris Lehane, chief global affairs officer at OpenAI, told reporters on Tuesday that the company backs a key provision of the FRONTIER Act, legislation from Reps. Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.) and Lori Trahan (D-Mass.) that would create the first federal framework for AI safety. Among other provisions, the legislation would force top AI labs to allow “independent verification organizations,” or IVOs, into their companies to make sure their models are developed safely.
In a Monday meeting on Capitol Hill, Lehane said he sat down with one of the bill’s sponsors and “specifically talked about how we think about IVO and made clear that we can support that.”
“I think it was important for them to hear that and hear it from us, and we wanted to be really clear about that,” the OpenAI lobbyist added.
It is the first time OpenAI has backed a specific federal mandate requiring third-party safety assessors to review the work of the top companies developing advanced AI.
But the company — whose lobbyists hold tremendous sway on Capitol Hill and across statehouses — has tiptoed closer to the idea for days.
Last week, OpenAI belatedly endorsed a California bill establishing an accreditation and vetting process for “independent verification organizations,” a technical term encompassing a stable of mostly Bay Area-based groups that would likely be tapped by governments to evaluate AI developers. The company announced its support for the measure just as Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed it into law.
That same day, Lehane published a blog post that called “independent verification” a key pillar of the “mandatory national AI safety requirements” that he’s now urging Congress to pass. And on Saturday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman pledged to voluntarily embed third-party evaluators within his company — a response to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who had made a similar promise hours earlier.
On Monday, an AI staffer in Trahan’s office, granted anonymity to freely discuss internal deliberations, called it a “really strong signal that the leaders of these labs jumped on board with Dario’s embedded evaluators idea.”
“They’re moving in the right direction and they’re moving beyond words. I think that’s all helpful,” the staffer said. The person added that the next few weeks “will be critical to see sort of how those firm commitments translate to actual legislation that the entire industry would be regulated by.”
Fonte: POLITICO – TOP Stories
