Proactive Investors - Current and former staff at AI firms OpenAI, Anthropic and Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Deepmind have published an open letter describing their concerns about the rapid advancement of AI with a lack of oversight and the absence of whistleblower protection.
In the letter, the AI professionals cited numerous risks from AI technologies including the further entrenchment of existing inequalities, manipulation and misinformation, and the loss of control of autonomous AI systems potentially resulting in human extinction.
They wrote that they believe these risks can be mitigated but AI companies have “strong financial incentives to avoid effective oversight and we do not believe bespoke structures of corporate governance are sufficient to change this.”
They called upon AI companies to commit to several principles, including facilitating an anonymous process for current and former employees to raise concerns to the company’s board, regulators and appropriate independent organizations and for these companies to support a culture of open criticism.
They also urged companies not to retaliate against current and former employees who publicly share risk-related confidential information after other processes have failed.
They noted that ordinary whistleblower protections are “insufficient” because they are focused on illegal activity, whereas the risks they are concerned about are not yet regulated.
“So long as there is no effective government oversight of these corporations, current and former employees are among the few people who can hold them accountable to the public,” they wrote.
“Some of us reasonably fear various forms of retaliation, given the history of such cases across the industry. We are not the first to encounter or speak about these issues.”