I agree there’s a surprising lack of published details about this, but it does seem very likely that labs made some kind of commitment to pre-deployment testing by governments. However, the details of this commitment were never published, and might never have been clear.
Here’s my understanding of the evidence:
First, Rishi Sunak said in a speech at the UK AI Safety Summit: “Like-minded governments and AI companies have today reached a landmark agreement. We will work together on testing the safety of new AI models before they are released.” An article about the speech said: “Sunak said the eight companies — Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Google, Google DeepMind, Inflection AI, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI and Open AI — had agreed to “deepen” the access already given to his Frontier AI Taskforce, which is the forerunner to the new institute.” I cannot find the full text of the speech, and these are the most specific details I’ve seen from the speech.
Second, an official press release from the UK government said:
In a statement on testing, governments and AI companies have recognised that both parties have a crucial role to play in testing the next generation of AI models, to ensure AI safety – both before and after models are deployed.
This includes collaborating on testing the next generation of AI models against a range of potentially harmful capabilities, including critical national security, safety and societal harms.
Based on the quotes from Sunak and the UK press release, it seems very unlikely that the named labs did not verbally agree to “work together on testing the safety of new AI models before they are released.” But given that the text of an agreement was never released, it’s also possible that the details were never hashed out, and the labs could argue that their actions did not violate any agreements that had been made. But if that were the case, then I would expect the labs to have said so. Instead, their quotes did not dispute the nature of the agreement.
Overall, it seems likely that there was some kind of verbal or handshake agreement, and that the labs violated the spirit of that agreement. But it would be incorrect to say that they violated specific concrete commitments released in writing.
Interesting. That seems possible, and if so, then the companies did not violate that agreement.
I’ve updated the first paragraph of the article to more clearly describe the evidence we have about these commitments. I’d love to see more information about exactly what happened here.
I agree there’s a surprising lack of published details about this, but it does seem very likely that labs made some kind of commitment to pre-deployment testing by governments. However, the details of this commitment were never published, and might never have been clear.
Here’s my understanding of the evidence:
First, Rishi Sunak said in a speech at the UK AI Safety Summit: “Like-minded governments and AI companies have today reached a landmark agreement. We will work together on testing the safety of new AI models before they are released.” An article about the speech said: “Sunak said the eight companies — Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Google, Google DeepMind, Inflection AI, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI and Open AI — had agreed to “deepen” the access already given to his Frontier AI Taskforce, which is the forerunner to the new institute.” I cannot find the full text of the speech, and these are the most specific details I’ve seen from the speech.
Second, an official press release from the UK government said:
Based on the quotes from Sunak and the UK press release, it seems very unlikely that the named labs did not verbally agree to “work together on testing the safety of new AI models before they are released.” But given that the text of an agreement was never released, it’s also possible that the details were never hashed out, and the labs could argue that their actions did not violate any agreements that had been made. But if that were the case, then I would expect the labs to have said so. Instead, their quotes did not dispute the nature of the agreement.
Overall, it seems likely that there was some kind of verbal or handshake agreement, and that the labs violated the spirit of that agreement. But it would be incorrect to say that they violated specific concrete commitments released in writing.
I suspect the informal agreement was nothing more than the UK AI safety summit “safety testing” session, which is devoid of specific commitments.
It seems weird that none of the labs would have said that when asked for comment?
Interesting. That seems possible, and if so, then the companies did not violate that agreement.
I’ve updated the first paragraph of the article to more clearly describe the evidence we have about these commitments. I’d love to see more information about exactly what happened here.