White House gets top AI companies to commit to responsible development

The Biden administration has secured voluntary commitments geared at managing the risks posed by artificial intelligence (AI) from seven top companies, the White House has announced.

Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Facebook parent company Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI have made the voluntary commitments, which include a pledge to develop mechanisms of watermarking to help users determine when audio and visual content is AI-generated, according to a White House official.

“Companies have a duty to do right by individuals and society and earn the American peoples’ trust by making it easy for users to tell whether audio and visual content is in its original form or has been altered or generated by AI, preventing bias and discrimination, shielding our children from harm and helping society overcome our greatest challenges, from cancer to climate change,” the official said. 

The companies also committed to internal and external testing of their AI systems’ capability and safety before releasing them to the public, and to sharing results of those tests as well as information on managing AI risks across the industry. 

Additionally, they’ve pledged to invest in safeguarding their models against a myriad of threats, to facilitate third-party discovery and reporting of their AI systems' vulnerabilities and to publicly report their systems’ capabilities and limitations, including security and societal risks. 

President Biden is convening the seven companies at the White House on Friday to announce the commitments. The move comes as part of the Biden administration’s effort to “seize the tremendous promise” of AI while also protecting Americans’ rights and safety against risks posed by the uncharted tech, according to a White House release.

Some of the companies have already been pursuing a few of the goals on their own, but the official said the new commitments are “pushing the envelope” on safety and security in the AI landscape. 

The White House is actively engaging with Congress on the issue to push for bipartisan legislation on responsible AI innovation, the official said, as well as developing an executive order that related to the issue, which the official described as a “high priority” for Biden and his team.