July 06, 2023

Frontier AI Regulation: Managing Emerging Risks to Public Safety

By: Markus Anderljung and Tim Fist

Responsible AI innovation can provide extraordinary benefits to society, such as delivering medical and legal services to more people at lower cost, enabling scalable personalized education, and contributing solutions to pressing global challenges like climate change and pandemic prevention. However, guardrails are necessary to prevent the pursuit of innovation from imposing excessive negative externalities on society. There is increasing recognition that government oversight is needed to ensure AI development is carried out responsibly; we hope to contribute to this conversation by exploring regulatory approaches to this end.

We think that it is important to begin taking practical steps to regulate frontier AI today, and that the ideas discussed in this paper are a step in that direction.

In this paper, we focus specifically on the regulation of frontier AI models, which we define as highly capable foundation models that could have dangerous capabilities sufficient to pose severe risks to public safety and global security. Examples of such dangerous capabilities include designing new biochemical weapons, producing highly persuasive personalized disinformation, and evading human control.

This article was originally published by Arxiv by authors Markus Anderljung, Joslyn Barnhart, Anton Korinek, Jade Leung, Cullen O'Keefe, Jess Whittlestone, Shahar Avin, Miles Brundage, Justin Bullock, Duncan Cass-Beggs, Ben Chang, Tantum Collins, Tim Fist, Gillian Hadfield, Alan Hayes, Lewis Ho, Sara Hooker, Eric Horvitz, Noam Kolt, Jonas Schuett, Yonadav Shavit, Divya Siddarth, Robert Trager, Kevin Wolf.

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