Prepare to Be Shocked: Major AI Players Join Forces, but the Real Game Changer Lies Ahead!

The AI ​​is here. It is transformative and it is changing the world. As a result, the allure of Silicon Valley has returned.

Across the country, in Washington, DC, an equally momentous sea change is taking place: Major players in the AI ​​industry are embracing a public policy approach almost as unexpected as the technology itself.

Today’s top AI companies are astute engage policymakers early. They are offering members of Congress and their staff briefings to better understand the technology, and have demonstrated a will to appear before committees publicly and privately. What’s more, they are organize multi-stakeholder forums and they are even signing joint agreements with the White House.

As someone who has worked on numerous public policy efforts spanning technology and the public sector, I have seen firsthand how difficult it is to get the private sector to come to terms with each other, let alone the government.

Some hold that the public pronouncements of the AI ​​industry are merely a facade. These companies know that Congress is moving at a glacial pace, if anything.

They know that the time it takes for Congress to establish a new regulatory and oversight agency, fund it, staff it, and provide it with the resources necessary for meaningful enforcement could take years. To put this in context, social media companies remain almost entirely unregulated decades after they first took the world by storm.

Regardless of their true motivations, the fact that all the big players in the AI ​​model are coming together so quickly and agreeing on broad security principles and regulatory barriers shows how seriously they take the potential risks of AI, as well as its unprecedented opportunities.

Never before has there been a technology that has so quickly mobilized the private sector to proactively seek government oversight. While we should celebrate its footsteps to date, what really matters is what comes next.

It’s clear that AI executives, along with their public policy teams, learned from the backlash to previous approaches around the rise of transformative technologies like social media and ride-sharing. At best, Silicon Valley ignored Congress. At worst, they made fun of it.

Furthermore, when asked to appear before legislative bodies, industry leaders clumsily and seemingly deliberately showed their obvious disdain. Their relationships with policy makers, along with the public’s opinion of those companies, soured as a result.

So far, we’re seeing the opposite approach with AI. CEOs appear before Congress, answering even the most trivial questions with what appears to be the utmost deference. They are speaking straight and do not overpromise the benefits or downplay the downsides. These leaders have been thoughtful, responsible and genuine.

As we move from the initial phase of simply showing favor for the curry, to the phase of making sausages and drafting a regulatory framework, your political and legislative strategies will be put to the test.

AI companies would do well to stay the course. After all, goodwill and trust are extremely hard to earn and very easy to lose.

To continue down the path of engagement, consultation, and action, AI industry leaders need to build on their early efforts. Here are several steps you should consider implementing:

1. Increase transparency: Find new ways to educate stakeholders on key aspects of current models—what’s in them, how they’re implemented, existing and future security measures—and close the curtain on the teams that build them. Plus, quickly share new research as well as newly discovered risks.
2. Accept and commit: Companies should not sign any joint agreement that they cannot or do not want to comply with. They should avoid vague language designed to provide the ability to circumvent promises. The short-term increase in positive media coverage is not worth the long-term reputational damage from failing to deliver on your commitment.
3. Greater inclusion of partners: The personal approach softens the most difficult aspects. Extend reach to the Capitol beyond members serving on relevant oversight committees and connect with all House and Senate offices. Hold group briefings followed by individual meetings. The same should be done with the think tank community and advocacy groups, especially the ones that are sounding the biggest alarm bells against AI.
4. Congressional Strike Force: Provide dedicated staff to help congressional staff with technical questions so they can better prepare their members for hearings and events in their home districts. Helping members answer constituents’ questions will build even more trust and goodwill.
5. State Government Scope: Activate an equally strong state government strategy. Democracy Laboratories could create a Regulatory nightmare for AI companies. Getting ahead of that now, just as they are doing with Congress, is essential to reduce compliance risk in the future.
6. Political Red Team: Add a policy making component to the red team exercises. Bring legislators from both sides of the aisle to demonstrate how the red team works both technically and substantively. And get their participation. It’s much harder to blame a company when you’re part of the solution, or at least invited to help.
7. Explain the regulatory rejection: Don’t talk publicly about welcoming regulatory reform and talk in generalities about security while quietly lobbying governments to remove aspects of bills in the US or Europe. That doesn’t mean accepting all regulations as written, but companies need to be clear and communicate why they are fighting certain provisions. It is better to be criticized for disagreeing with a specific policy than to be seen as a liar or harboring false motives.
8. Safety Reward Programs: Beyond specialized hackathons, create security-focused bounty programs inspired by traditional software bug bounty programs that incentivize users to report security vulnerabilities. The business imperative to develop new AI products means that even the best security measures are likely to lag behind innovation. Traditionally, when there is a problem with a high-risk product or service, such as aircraft or automobiles, the industry pauses operations with a grounding or recall to assess and fix the problem. However, with software, companies tend to apply patches while still running the platform. This makes it more important than ever to reduce the time between identifying and fixing a security breach.

Time will tell if this new and radically different approach to public policy is here to stay or if it is a passing thing. Ultimately, companies will have to chart their own policy course. While there is no one-size-fits-all solution, anyone who thinks they’ve done enough is in for a rude awakening.