Inside the scramble for trusted AI cops

A host of industry players, policy wonks and businesses are grappling with the question of how to regulate AI in a trustworthy manner.

Inside the White House, it's mostly business as usual.

Why it matters: The industry's mad dash is the product of an ad hoc regulatory apparatus and a general consensus that swift action from Washington is unlikely in the near term .

State of play: AI CEOs have been grappling with how to test advanced AI and work with Beijing on safety standards, while the White House favors a solution where the industry finds ways to police itself.

That means the race is on to decide who will be anointed as third-party evaluators of AI systems and controls as the companies await legislation or White House action beyond the current voluntary process.

A robust ecosystem of safety and benchmarking groups already exists, but some White House officials and AI execs see them as too closely tied to top AI companies.

Other options include businesses and startups that already do evaluations, as well as some more unorthodox suggestions.

What they're saying: Companies have the most expertise when it comes to AI and understand what the White House's AI voluntary framework requires, according to a White House official.

"These people are not 12-year-olds," the official said.

"The top frontier companies need to come to a consensus on what they want because they haven't agreed on anything," the official continued.

"If these companies feel it's such a dire situation, they have every right, reason, and ability to throttle their models." Friction point: Some third-party evaluators — including individuals at METR, which investigated the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident — have been singled out for having close ties to the effective altruism movement , as well as to companies they would be policing.

One of the lead outside investigators of the Hugging Face episode is married to Paul Christiano , a seasoned AI safety and technology official who recently joined the board of OpenAI's non-profit foundation.

An Anthropic employee recently left the startup to work at METR as well.

METR has said it doesn't take funding from frontier labs.