Seven of the most competitive tech companies have publicly pledged to follow some specific guidelines when advancing AI technologies.

Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic and Inflection agreed to the ideals and constraints July 21.

The harmony among alpha rivals was orchestrated by the Biden Administration. It’s organized around three principles that all seven players agree “must be fundamental to the future of AI”—safety, security and trust.

By saying yes to the White House’s proposal, the seven have promised to:

1. Commit to internal and external red-teaming of models or systems in areas including misuse, societal risks and national security concerns such as bio, cyber and other safety areas.
2. Work toward information sharing among companies and governments regarding trust and safety risks, dangerous or emergent capabilities and attempts to circumvent safeguards.
3. Invest in cybersecurity and insider threat safeguards to protect proprietary and unreleased model weights.
4. Incent third-party discovery and reporting of issues and vulnerabilities.
5. Develop and deploy mechanisms that enable users to understand if audio or visual content is AI-generated, including robust provenance, watermarking or both, for AI-generated audio or visual content.
6. Publicly report model or system capabilities, limitations and domains of appropriate and inappropriate use, including discussion of societal risks such as effects on fairness and bias
7. Prioritize research on societal risks posed by AI systems, including on avoiding harmful bias and discrimination, and protecting privacy.
8. Develop and deploy frontier AI systems to help address society’s greatest challenges.

What close watchers are noticing: 

• The voluntary commitments announced [July 21] are not enforceable—Paul Barrett of New York University in The New York Times
   
• The guidelines outlined Friday don’t require companies to disclose information about their training data—Sabrina Siddiqui and Deepa Seetharaman of The Wall Street Journal
   
• Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have introduced legislation to regulate the tech in the weeks since Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) began trying to corral bipartisan action on AI in June—Makena Kelly of The Verge
   
• Critics argue that [OpenAI CEO] Sam Altman and other AI doomsayers are incentivized to push for regulation because it would raise the barrier of entry for potential rivals and make it harder for them to compete with deep-pocketed industry leaders—Thomas Barrabi of the New York Post