What if AI Safety employees unionised?

A proposal suggests that AI safety researchers could unionize to collectively bargain against companies that renege on safety commitments, though legal and practical hurdles exist. The idea faces challenges such as restrictions on negotiating business strategy, exclusion of supervisors, and risks for visa-holding employees. Alternative mechanisms like public mass-resignation pledges are also considered.

American bald eagle caws angrily in the distance Whoa whoa whoa, just hear me out. Unions aren’t usually a good answer for free-market loving libertarians, but one particular AI safety problem is awfully union-shaped: Repeatedly, companies have started out being pro-AI safety and talked the talk about how they’d take precautions around building advanced AI systems. Repeatedly, this line was used to placate & hire very talented researchers who cared about AI safety. Repeatedly, these companies did not in fact take precautions around building advanced AI systems. Imagine you’re a researcher who’s concerned about the risks posed by advanced AI maybe you don’t have to imagine . Imagine further that you join a company in large part due to their strong safety commitments. Wary of value drift https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-fences-on-slippery-slopes , you write down your red lines: “If my beloved company starts racing to AGI, I’ll quit”. You even tell your new boss about your red lines. He nods seriously. A few months go by, and alas, your company reneges their AI safety commitments. This leaves you in a bit of a pickle: You could threaten to quit, but they’ve publicly turned away from AI safety and you alone are unlikely to change their minds. You could say you’ll quit next time they cross your line in the sand, but that threat is less convincing the second time round. You think to yourself: If only there was some sort of conglomeration-like structure that could represent all AI safety employees, allowing them to raise their complaints and actually be heard. Hmmm… Such a conglomeration could credibly threaten or even veto moves by the company that would be decidedly unsafe. This would be great Unions are designed to allow employees who face a mass-action problem to combine their bargaining power and steer their company in a better direction. Usually this is used to get benefits like greater wages, more time off, more work, or less gruelling work. But possibly, a union or something shaped like a union is an existing mechanism that can be applied to let researchers credibly threaten their employer if the employer seeks to take actions that increase the risk posed by advanced AI. Unfortunately, all is not as clear as I made it out to be. Unions don’t quite work as nicely as I described: Unions can’t negotiate around business strategy nor corporate governance, only things like wages, hours, and “other terms and conditions of employment” NLRA§8 a 5 https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/COMPS-8189/pdf/COMPS-8189.pdf . Plausibly “other terms of employment” could include safety-relevant factors, but this seems a bit of a push. NLRA §2 11 https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/COMPS-8189/pdf/COMPS-8189.pdf says roughly that supervisors can’t be in a union, and this likely includes anyone who leads a team or has authority over other employees in some way. So leading a research team would preclude you from joining an AI safety union although you likely have more negotiating power if you’re a team lead . Many AI researchers are on visas, and cannot risk being fired 1 . Even the researches who aren’t on visas likely have a significant amount of wealth tied up in unvested stock options, and won’t quit for a small infraction. The employees risk Possibly, a union isn’t actually required. AI safety employees could in theory agree to resign if certain red-lines were crossed, and could make this agreement public for their employer to see. If this agreement was considered a credible threat and if many employees had signed the same agreement as opposed to hundreds of subtly-different agreements , then an employer might take the contents of those agreements into account when considering business decisions that raise safety concerns. Such a contract would need the following: The hard part, of course, is defining the red lines that triggers mass-resignation. I’m unsure what this would look like, given the diversity of opinions around AI risks. Ideally we’d find some red-lines that are serious enough that they indicate a meaningful risk, but not so serious that by the time they’re triggered it’s too late and mass-resignation won’t have any effect. Note that employees would be giving up a lot by threatening to resign. Nobody’s going to give up millions of dollars in unvested equity just because Claude kinda blackmailed someone in an evaluation. If the red-lines are not sufficiently serious, nobody’s going to believe the threat. A third party could adjudicate the signing, allowing employees to sign the contract confidentially, while still reporting the number of signatories to the employer 2 . The third party could be charged with deciding if the red-lines have been crossed, although this potentially just passes the buck instead of resolving the issue. Having a large number of signatories could be a positive thing for safety-focussed companies, since it’s a costly signal that their employees actually care about AI safety. On the other hand, if such a contract were common knowledge and your “AI safety” company had no employees who had signed it, this would be a good indicator that the company doesn’t actually care about the risks due to AI. Many problems circle around the issue of companies credibly signalling their commitments to AI safety. There are many dual-use research agendas such as mechanistic interpretability which a company might pursue in the name of AI safety, but later the approach changes when the company becomes interested in seeking a profit. An expensive mechanism which allowed companies and their employees to signal their commitment to AI safety would resolve many uncertainties around company agendas and charters. Note that non-profits could help by offering to employ people who are at risk of losing their visa and who resign due to their employer reneging their safety commitments. The annual H1B visa cap does not apply to non-profits, so a non-profit could sponsor employees as soon as they quit. This would reduce the downside to the employee for quitting. Grant makers like Coefficient Giving could aid here, by offering to fund the legal bills and sponsorship for H-1B & O-1A visas. However, it could be catastrophic for the non-profit: they’d be committing to hiring a significant number of highly-skilled workers all at once, since this would only happen if a frontier AI company crossed the red lines and caused a large number of employees to quit. It’s also illegal to pay someone without genuine employment. They need to be actually doing work, not just sitting around. I don’t think it’d be impossible to create genuine employment for dozens of AI safety researchers if they suddenly become unemployed. But pre-emptively planning to spin up an organisation that conveniently hires whoever quit their job is the sort of thing that Uncle Sam might not look kindly on. I assume there’s a way around this without doing shady things, but I lack the legalese to know what this looks like. If a large fraction of your employees had signed a contract like one described above, your best move as safety-ignoring employer would be to specification-game the red-lines, finding as many caveats that let you continue to improve your AI without technically crossing the red-lines. I’m unsure I think a contract as I’ve described above could provide useful signal about which companies are willing to take costly actions to build safer AI systems, and which are not. I suspect that what I’ve described is too naive in ways that I can’t see. I think that some variant of what I’ve described could work and reduce the risks posed by advanced AIs. They are very unlikely to strike since NLRB v. Mackay Radio established that economic strikers can be “permanently replaced” — a crazy piece of legalese that means your employer can hire permanent replacements to do the job while you’re on strike. The job you had is now gone, which leaves you unemployed. Technically you get put on a “priority list” to be re-hired. I’m doubtful about whether you’d actually be re-hired. There is a slight caveat: strikes due to unfair labour practices are different, and do require the employer to give you your job back after the strike ends. There’s some interesting encrypted-information protocols see Callisto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callisto project that originated as a way to let sexual assault be reported anonymously such that a lawyer is only contacted if more than k people report the same person. This approximately removes the need for a third party, although still requires someone who acts on the information once more than k people have reported it.