Top AI Firms Move Toward Self-Regulation Amid US Inaction

Some of the top names in AI are working on creating a standards body they say would regulate the industry amid rising fears about its dangers and an apparent US reluctance to police its speedy development.

ChatGPT-maker OpenAI on Tuesday said it was working with top competitors Anthropic and Google on a self-regulatory body.

This comes amid rising calls for stricter control on the technology that is growing at lightning speed and not without dangerous precedents, calls that have thus far gone unanswered by the Donald Trump administration.

What do we know about the proposed self-regulatory body?

The regulatory body, proposed by Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis, would be modeled after the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, which oversees US brokers and investment firms.

Hassabis had called in July for a federal organization that would test the most powerful AI systems before they are released to the public.

He suggested funding would come from the industry to "attract world-class technical talent and provide the necessary compute resources for large-scale testing."

The proposal comes amid growing concerns about AI safety, which have escalated in recent weeks amid warnings from two former workers at major AI developers.

Researcher Jacob Coxon, a former OpenAI employee, resigned from Anthropic last week, sounding the alarm that AI companies were "gambling with our lives."

On Monday, former Google DeepMind researcher Bilal Chughtai echoed his concerns, warning that "AI has the potential to kill us all, and that we might be running out of time to avoid this outcome."

Even top names within the industry have raised similar concerns.

On Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for a slowdown in the industry's development, with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, xAI's Elon Musk and Hassabis all supporting the sentiment.

How has the US government under Trump reacted to the calls?

Trump has dismissed the calls to better curb AI's development as "hoaxes" and a "conspiracy," while a divided Congress, narrowly controlled by Trump's Republicans, has failed to act.

The looming midterm elections make it unlikely any action will come soon despite AI and the power-hungry data centers needed to run it being a concern for many voters.

Trump's dismissal has been applauded by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, whose chipmaking company powers the vast majority of AI systems. Huang thanked the US president for "seeing through" the warnings on AI.

The dire prediction that AI could destroy humanity "is not grounded on science," Huang said.

Leading Republicans, including Vice President JD Vance, have, however, expressed caution.

Amid Washington's persistent apathy toward regulation, smaller AI companies have warned any self-regulatory measures would come at their expense.

Canadian AI company Cohere's chief, Aidan Gomez, has accused the dominant American AI labs of forming a "cartel" under the guise of safety.

"AI needs guardrails. That is not the dispute and never has been. The dispute is over who writes them, who gets to participate and whose interests the rules are protecting," Gomez wrote in a blog post on Sunday.