AI companies promised to self-regulate one year ago. What’s changed?

One year ago, seven leading AI companies—Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI—committed with the White House to a set of eight voluntary commitments on how to develop AI in a safe and trustworthy way. These included promises to do things like improve the testing and transparency around AI systems, and share information on potential harms and risks. In this edition of What’s Next in Tech, learn what progress the tech sector has made since then and what work still needs to be done.

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The White House’s voluntary AI commitments have brought better red-teaming practices and watermarks, but no meaningful transparency or accountability.

On the first anniversary of these voluntary commitments, MIT Technology Review asked the AI companies that signed the commitments for details on their work so far. Their replies show that the tech sector has made some welcome progress, with big caveats.

Commitment 1: The companies commit to internal and external security testing of their AI systems before their release. This testing, which will be carried out in part by independent experts, guards against some of the most significant sources of AI risks, such as biosecurity and cybersecurity, as well as its broader societal effects.

All the companies (excluding Inflection, which chose not to comment) say they conduct red-teaming exercises that get both internal and external testers to probe their models for flaws and risks. OpenAI says it has a separate preparedness team that tests models for cybersecurity, chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threats and for situations where a sophisticated AI model can do or persuade a person to do things that might lead to harm. Anthropic and OpenAI also say they conduct these tests with external experts before launching their new models.?

For example, for the launch of Anthropic’s latest model, Claude 3.5, the company conducted predeployment testing with experts at the UK’s AI Safety Institute. Anthropic has also allowed METR, a research nonprofit, to do an “initial exploration” of Claude 3.5’s capabilities for autonomy.?

Google says it also conducts internal red-teaming to test the boundaries of its model, Gemini, around election-related content, societal risks, and national security concerns. Microsoft says it has worked with third-party evaluators at NewsGuard, an organization advancing journalistic integrity, to evaluate risks and mitigate the risk of abusive deepfakes in Microsoft’s text-to-image tool. In addition to red-teaming, Meta says, it evaluated its latest model, Llama 3, to understand its performance in a series of risk areas like weapons, cyberattacks, and child exploitation.?

But when it comes to testing, it’s not enough to just report that a company is taking actions, says Rishi Bommasani, the society lead at the Stanford Center for Research on Foundation Models, who also reviewed the responses for MIT Technology Review. For example, Amazon and Anthropic said they had worked with the nonprofit Thorn to combat risks to child safety posed by AI. Bommasani would have wanted to see more specifics about how the interventions that companies are implementing actually reduce those risks.?

“It should become clear to us that it’s not just that companies are doing things but those things are having the desired effect,” Bommasani says.??

Result: Good. The push for red-teaming and testing for a wide range of risks is a good and important one. However, Merve Hickok, the president and research director of the Center for AI and Digital Policy, who also reviewed the companies’ replies, would have liked to see independent researchers get broader access to companies’ models.?

Read the story for the rest of our assessment of the progress AI companies have made in the past year.

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Image: Sarah Rogers/MITTR | Getty