The world’s biggest artificial intelligence (AI) companies are slated to visit the White House on Friday and discuss non-binding safety commitments with US President Joe Biden. The action represents the first step to ensure AI’s responsible and ethical use, which continues to grow at the speed of light.

OpenAI, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Other Leading AI Firms to Meet President Biden

According to a TechCrunch report, representatives of top AI companies are set to meet with US President Joe Biden to discuss non-binding safety commitments and transparency goals associated with the rapidly-growing tech field.

In particular, top officials from leading AI developers, including OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Inflection, and Anthropic, are expected to visit the White House on July 21 and sit with President Biden to talk about the AI regulatory landscape. The planned meeting represents a purely voluntary action with no proposed rule or enforcement.

The move comes after the Biden administration collected “voluntary commitments” from 7 top US AI companies to meet safety and transparency goals ahead of an upcoming Executive Order, the report states. Notably, the aforementioned AI developers have pledged to take several necessary steps to enhance AI systems’ security and responsible deployment.

These include conducting security tests and “red teaming” before an AI system is released, sharing risk information with the government, academia, and “civil society,” investing in cybersecurity and insider threat safeguards, encouraging third-party vulnerability reporting, and developing watermarking or some other way of marking AI content. Further, the companies also committed to providing transparency on AI system capabilities and limitations and prioritizing research on societal risks, among other things.

US Concerned About AI’s Impact on Upcoming Elections

The meeting between top AI firms and the White House comes on the heels of unprecedented growth in this tech field, triggered by the recent success of generative AI solutions, particularly OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In response to the rapid expansion of the AI industry, major tech conglomerates such as Microsoft, Baidu, Alphabet, and, most recently, Apple have been actively pursuing their share of this burgeoning market.

The US regulatory framework ensuring responsible and ethical use of AI technology could be years away while the industry continues to scurry. This gap has raised concerns among US lawmakers and tech entrepreneurs that AI could eventually pose safety and privacy risks.

There are already hints of this becoming a likely possibility with the emergence of deep fakes – the manipulation of facial appearance through AI-powered methods. The US government is worried that misuse of such solutions could pose a threat, particularly ahead of the presidential elections next year.

This article originally appeared on The Tokenist

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