One of AI's most prominent companies and the White House have different views on how the tech should be governed.
Following the Trump Administration's executive order requesting a window for government review of powerful new models, OpenAI has released a policy document calling for more stringent oversight than the US government is proposing.
"Effective governance requires visibility into how frontier capabilities are evolving … Building that understanding necessitates creating institutions capable of evaluating frontier AI, monitoring how capabilities evolve, and providing policymakers with reliable information," OpenAI said in the document.
The policy paper differs from the executive order in two key areas: which agencies are responsible for administering these pre-deployment safety evaluations, and whether they must be completed at all.
- While the executive order calls for the National Security Agency, a defense agency, to govern these checks, OpenAI suggests that they be run by civilian agencies: The Center for AI Standards and Innovation, or CAISI, working under the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST.
- Additionally, OpenAI's paper calls for these checks to be mandatory, while the executive order poses these evaluations as a voluntary framework.
Still, while OpenAI seeks to nudge the US government toward its regulatory framework, CEO Sam Altman said in a post on X that the executive order "gets the balance right" on the US leading in AI development while ensuring safety.
Altman isn't the only one supporting the executive order. Rival Anthropic said in a post on X that the order is an important step in "strengthening America’s leadership in AI." IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said at the Axios AI+NY Summit on Wednesday that he supports the government's light-touch guardrails. Meanwhile, Stephen Schmidt, Amazon's Senior VP and Chief Security Officer, said in a post on Linkedin that the company welcomes the executive order.
Our Deeper View #
It makes sense that major AI companies are largely showing their support for this declawed executive order: For one, AI is largely losing the narrative among the American public, and these companies backing an executive order that subjects the tech to regulation (even though it isn't mandatory) could signal to the public that they care about the broader societal impacts. OpenAI suggesting that these checks be required is essentially taking this to the next level. Given that it operates the most popular consumer-facing AI product on the market, OpenAI pushing for stricter regulation may be an attempt at winning the court of public opinion. Rather than looking like the lab seeking growth at all costs, this proposal gave OpenAI the opportunity to appear as though it wants to go above and beyond its peers in safety.