OpenAI pushes for mandatory national AI safety requirements

Splendid. OpenAI — the ChatGPT maker, per Reuters, in case the branding had escaped you — has decided that what American AI regulation has been missing all along is the enthusiastic endorsement of the regulated. On Wednesday the company announced it is pushing for mandatory national AI safety requirements, which is a bit like a fox campaigning for mandatory henhouse inspections, provided the fox writes the inspection criteria. And there's the lovely conditional buried mid-sentence: until the U.S. Congress acts, OpenAI will keep supporting state AI legislation. 'Until' doing an awful lot of heavy lifting there — a promise with a trapdoor, renewable indefinitely by the simple expedient of Congress doing nothing at all.

The four California bills are the meat: SB 813, infrastructure for independent safety assessments; AB 1405, standards for AI auditors; SB 1119, protections for young people; and AB 1864, safeguards against AI-enabled biological threats. Three of those are the sort of thing every lab already says it supports in a blog post between funding rounds. The fourth is a bill about AI and biological weapons, tucked at the end of the list like a footnote about the gas bill. Reuters gives us a bill number and a subject line — no sponsor, no text, no penalties — which is one way to support mandatory standards without ever having to say what mandatory means.

Cheering on state legislation while Congress dithers is the industry's favourite arrangement: fifty regulators, none of whom can meaningfully constrain a data centre in another state, plus a federal vacuum into which a lab's own preferred framework can be dropped at leisure. Meanwhile OpenAI gets to be the company that asked to be regulated, which is superb positioning and costs roughly nothing as long as the requirements stay things it already does. Mandatory national safety requirements, yes — just as soon as somebody else writes them, passes them, funds them and enforces them. Wednesday's announcement is a press release about a future other people are supposed to build.