President Trump’s plan to let A.I. companies police themselves comes amid mounting examples that they are failing to put safeguards on the technology. If there was something familiar about the voluntary safety guidelines that President Trump signed on Tuesday with the nation’s frontier artificial intelligence companies, this may be the reason: It closely echoed a previous agreement that President Joseph R. Biden Jr. struck with many of the same firms three years ago. But the question now is whether the kind of voluntary framework that seemed plausible in 2023 is sufficient in 2026.
Back then, the central concept was the same: Since federal regulations could not keep up with the blistering pace of new A.I. models, the companies agreed to set up systems to monitor themselves. “We must be cleareyed and vigilant about the threats emerging from emerging technologies,” Mr. Biden said in July 2023. Mr. Trump essentially offered the same approach on Tuesday afternoon. “They’re really going to be policing each other,” he said, as the leaders of Anthropic, Open AI, Google, Meta, Nvidia and Space X AI nodded.
After a summer of surprises — of A.I. agents escaping the “sandboxes” designed to contain them — why would anyone think these protections are sufficient? The layered early-warning systems have clearly failed. New cases of A.I. agents behaving badly emerge nearly daily. “We recognized in 2023 that voluntary pledges alone would not be enough, which is why President Biden followed up with an executive order,” noted Ben Buchanan, a Johns Hopkins professor. “Given how fast A.I. capabilities have advanced, it’s even clearer now the federal government will need to act once again.”
Source: New York Times Top Stories · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing