AI founders at San Francisco Tech Week cheer Trump's call for the industry to police itself, AP reports, as former insiders call the pact no substitute for law
AP says the voluntary agreement the labs signed runs 308 words. A former OpenAI safety leader and a former FTC adviser say self-regulation gives companies freedom and has failed before.
Venture capitalists and AI founders at Tech Week in San Francisco are praising the Trump administration's hands-off approach to AI, the Associated Press reported on 10 October (Garance Burke). AP lists what that approach has meant: repealing the Biden administration's AI executive order on day one, cancelling the requirement to share safety test results, and a December executive order aimed at blocking state-level AI rules.
The voluntary agreement AI leaders signed with the president is 308 words long, AP says. It asks labs to follow safety protocols and set up internal teams to monitor their own progress, and the administration has yet to give details of how it would keep bad things from happening, AP reports. Trump called the pact “almost a constitution”, according to AP.
AP quotes two critics. David Robinson, a leader on OpenAI's safety team until he recently resigned: “This is no substitute for hard law, and it does give a lot of freedom to the companies,” Sarah Myers West, co-executive director of the nonprofit AI Now and a former senior AI adviser to the Federal Trade Commission: “Across the board, this self-regulatory approach has consistently done one thing, which is failed to work.”
AP also notes the White House calling incident notification and remediation “not optional” after Anthropic's disclosure. The pact itself ran in the Switchboard on 30 September; what is new is the reaction in the industry's home town, and the critics' case that a voluntary accord is no substitute for regulation.
- Reported AP reports that the voluntary agreement is 308 words, asks labs to follow safety protocols and set up internal monitoring teams, and that the administration has yet to say how it would prevent harm. AP, via ABC News
- Reported Former OpenAI safety leader David Robinson told AP the pact is no substitute for hard law and gives companies a lot of freedom. AP, via ABC News
- Reported AI Now's Sarah Myers West, a former senior AI adviser to the FTC, told AP that self-regulation has consistently failed to work. AP, via ABC News
Courts & policySafety, security & governance
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