July 06, 2023

Frontier AI Regulation: Managing Emerging Risks to Public Safety

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.

  • Podcast
    • October 17, 2024
    U.S. Chip Controls and the Future of AI Compute

    That escalated quickly! Emily and Geoff discuss why the U.S. aim to deny China access to the computing power necessary for frontier AI capabilities has led to an ever expandin...

    By Emily Kilcrease, Geoffrey Gertz & Pablo Chavez

  • Podcast
    • October 11, 2024
    Asymmetry and AI: The Battle for Power

    Paul Scharre, Vice President and Director of Studies at CNAS, joins Zero Pressure to discuss the world of asymmetric warfare, a term used to describe imbalances in conflict. F...

    By Paul Scharre

  • Commentary
    • Just Security
    • September 19, 2024
    Competition, Not Control, is Key to Winning the Global AI Race

    The United States, with much of the world’s AI-enabling infrastructure, has positioned itself as the global leader in AI innovation. That might not be the case for much longer...

    By Keegan McBride & Matthew Mittelsteadt

  • Commentary
    • Time
    • September 16, 2024
    Regulating AI Is Easier Than You Think

    Countries can regulate AI from the ground up by controlling access to highly specialized chips...

    By Paul Scharre

View All Reports View All Articles & Multimedia