Ahead of Sam Altman's UN address, OpenAI proposes new ways to track AI misalignment risks - Axios

OpenAI has published a set of international AI safety standards, which is a bit like the fox publishing a pamphlet on henhouse architecture and routing it through the planning department. The recommended mechanism leans on AI safety institutes around the world, with the U.S. Center for AI Security and Innovation — a sub-office of the Commerce Department — handling the standard-setting, because when you think existential risk, you think trade policy. The timing is, as ever, immaculate: the release lands just ahead of Sam Altman's address to the United Nations, where the word 'global' will be deployed with tremendous sincerity. Nothing says accountability quite like announcing the rules yourself, from a podium, shortly before you have to discuss them.

Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng have been discussing a U.S.-China AI dialogue in which each side notifies the other when an AI incident reaches national security risk levels. Read that again: notification at the point where it has already become a national security matter. The Shenzhen sit-down we flagged now has a hotline attached. The word 'incident' is doing its usual diplomatic labour here, covering everything from a chatbot being rude to something considerably worse, while the threshold for picking up the phone is 'national security risk levels'. Two governments have discussed telling each other about the disaster once it is a disaster. Generous.

And note who is proposing what to whom. OpenAI — a company that would be among the regulated — has helpfully drafted the international standards and pointed at the safety institutes that might carry them, routed through a Commerce Department centre whose remit is trade. Voluntary standards, from the standardised, delivered by the standardiser's chief executive, ahead of a UN address, at the precise moment governments are negotiating who writes the binding version. It's a public comment period with better lighting. The standards are international, non-binding and thoroughly publicised, and we are all meant to find that reassuring.