From my perspective, a large part of the point of safety policies is that people can comment on the policies in advance and provide some pressure toward better policies. If policies are changed at the last minute, then the world may not have time to understand the change and respond before it is too late.
So, I think it’s good to create an expectation/norm that you shouldn’t substantially weaken a policy right as it is being applied. That’s not to say that a reasonable company shouldn’t do this some of the time, just that I think it should by default be considered somewhat bad, particularly if there isn’t a satisfactory explanation given. In this case, I find the object level justification for the change somewhat dubious (at least for the AI R&D trigger) and there is also no explanation of why this change was made at the last minute.
I guess I’m fairly sympathetic to this. It makes me think that voluntary safety policies should ideally include some meta-commentary about how companies view the purpose and value-add of the safety policy, and meta-policies about how updates to the safety policy will be made—in particular, that it might be good to specify a period for public comments before a change is implemented. (Even a short period could be some value add.)
From my perspective, a large part of the point of safety policies is that people can comment on the policies in advance and provide some pressure toward better policies. If policies are changed at the last minute, then the world may not have time to understand the change and respond before it is too late.
So, I think it’s good to create an expectation/norm that you shouldn’t substantially weaken a policy right as it is being applied. That’s not to say that a reasonable company shouldn’t do this some of the time, just that I think it should by default be considered somewhat bad, particularly if there isn’t a satisfactory explanation given. In this case, I find the object level justification for the change somewhat dubious (at least for the AI R&D trigger) and there is also no explanation of why this change was made at the last minute.
I guess I’m fairly sympathetic to this. It makes me think that voluntary safety policies should ideally include some meta-commentary about how companies view the purpose and value-add of the safety policy, and meta-policies about how updates to the safety policy will be made—in particular, that it might be good to specify a period for public comments before a change is implemented. (Even a short period could be some value add.)