White House Weighs Regulator to Police AI Models

The White House is reportedly exploring plans to create a regulator focused on artificial intelligence safety.

That’s according to a report Friday (July 17) from Bloomberg News, which said this plan follows complaints from Silicon Valley about the government’s recent curbs on new AI models from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI.

Sources familiar with the matter told Bloomberg the proposal, now being reviewed by White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, would establish an independent regulator focused on AI and reporting to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), similar to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA).

Bloomberg noted that this approach could provide more certainty for Anthropic and OpenAI. The former company was issued export controls last month that caused it to temporarily disable its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models, while the latter made major changes to its newest Sol model before release, at the government’s request.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic, the report added, protested the government’s decisions, saying they were excessive in light of the safety issues involved.

Bloomberg’s sources said the proposal is designed to appease Wall Street firms hoping to lessen AI’s cybersecurity risks, as well as tech companies who think the White House’s approach to regulating AI has been inconsistent.

The news comes days after Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis called for a U.S.-led standards body to independently test advanced AI models for national security threats prior to their release.

Artificial general intelligence capable of matching the human brain across a broad range of tasks is “probably only a few short years away,” leaving society a “precious window” to establish oversight, Hassabis said, per a Financial Times report.

Hassabis proposed modeling the organization on FINRA, and said a U.S.-initiated systems could become the basis for international standards as governments confront risks from increasingly capable systems, according to the FT report.

As PYMNTS wrote, the White House has already undertaken some prerelease oversight. An executive order issued in June sought voluntary access to covered frontier models for up to 30 days prior to release to gauge advanced cyber capabilities. Google DeepMind, Microsoft and xAI had agreed to submit models for federal national security testing.

In other AI news, PYMNTS wrote Saturday (July 18) about the expanding range of AI-related job titles, and how it provides a counterpoint to the “darker debate” regarding employment and artificial intelligence.

“Most discussion centers on how many jobs AI will eliminate,” that report said. “Hiring data presents a more complicated picture that includes a weak overall labor market containing a small but rapidly growing neighborhood of AI-related work.”

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