White House secures AI safeguard agreements from eight additional tech companies
CNN
By Arlette Saenz
(CNN) — Eight new-technology companies – including Adobe, IBM, Nvidia, Palantir and Salesforce – are making voluntary commitments on artificial intelligence, a senior Biden administration official told CNN, as the White House looks to safeguard development of the emerging technology while working toward more comprehensive regulation.
The agreements, which will be discussed at a White House meeting with chief of staff Jeff Zients, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and industry leaders on Tuesday, build on voluntary commitments announced earlier this summer by seven leading AI companies, including Microsoft and Google, with the goal of driving “safe, secure, and trustworthy development of AI technology,” the White House said.
“The president has been clear: Harness the benefits of AI, manage the risks, and move fast – very fast. And we are doing just that by partnering with the private sector and pulling every lever we have to get this done,” Zients said in a statement ahead of Tuesday’s meeting.
The second wave of commitments, which also include the companies Cohere, Scale AI and Stability, is similar to those laid out earlier this summer, including agreeing to outside testing of AI systems ahead of their public release and to putting protocols in place to ensure users know when content is AI generated.
The companies are also committing to “investing in cybersecurity and insider threat safeguards to protect proprietary and unreleased model weights”; sharing information on managing AI risks with others in the industry and governments; focusing on research on the societal risks posed by AI; and developing systems to “help address society’s greatest challenges,” the White House said.
A senior administration official said while the commitments announced in July came from companies training large AI systems, this new round of announcements includes a broader swath of the industry, including companies doing “business to business” or those doing creative work.
The push comes as President Joe Biden’s administration is still working toward crafting executive actions on artificial intelligence, the first of which were expected to be rolled out this summer. The official who spoke to CNN said the administration has “made a lot of progress” toward but would not detail when the plans would be unveiled.
Biden administration officials have also been in discussions with lawmakers on Capitol Hill about developing legislation to regulate AI.
“We must be clear-eyed and vigilant about the threats of emerging technologies that can pose – they don’t have to – but can pose to our democracy and our values,” Biden said in July. “This is a serious responsibility. We have to get it right. There’s an enormous, enormous potential upside as well.”
The White House meeting comes as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is set to host more than half a dozen leading tech CEOs, including Mark Zuckerberg of Meta and Elon Musk of X – the company formerly known as Twitter – in Washington on Wednesday as part of an “AI Insight Forum” to discuss questions facing AI regulation. The event is also expected to include Google CEO Sundar Pichai and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
The-CNN-Wire
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CNN’s Brian Fung and Jeremy Diamond contributed to this report
