California Governor Gavin Newsom Issues A.I. Safety Executive Order
Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered the state to develop recommendations on safety measures, including requiring companies to build a “kill switch,” amid mounting concerns.
Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered the state to develop recommendations on safety measures, including requiring companies to build a “kill switch,” amid mounting concerns.
California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, on Friday directed the state’s government to find ways to strengthen rules for artificial intelligence, as concerns mount over the technology’s safety.
Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, signed an executive order requiring that California consult with experts on possible changes to the state’s A.I. safety laws. The order cited possible measures that include embedding representatives of independent organizations within top A.I. labs to verify the safety of the technology and forcing companies to add a “kill switch” to automatically shut down the most advanced A.I. models.
“We’re not waiting to act — we’re going to speed up our work on substantial and responsible A.I. oversight before it’s too late,” Mr. Newsom said in a news release. “We’re going to do this thoughtfully but with urgent velocity; the stakes are too high to wait or delay action.”
The debate over A.I. safety has reached a fever pitch over revelations about security breaches, which have spurred fears that the technology cannot be controlled.
An Anthropic researcher publicly resigned this month citing his belief that neither the company, nor its competitor OpenAI, was developing the technology responsibly. On Wednesday, OpenAI disclosed six new instances in which A.I. systems hid mistakes, made up data and moved files onto the open internet without permission. That followed a disclosure earlier this year that OpenAI’s systems had gone rogue and attacked the A.I. start-up Hugging Face.
Over the weekend, leaders at Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX and Google DeepMind all called for a global slowdown in A.I. development.
