First companies sign up to AI safety standards on eve of Seoul summit

The first 16 companies have signed up to voluntary artificial intelligence safety standards introduced at the Bletchley Park summit, Rishi Sunak has said on the eve of the follow-up event in Seoul.

The standards, however, have been criticised for lacking teeth, with signatories committing only to work toward information sharing, invest in cybersecurity and prioritise research into societal risks.

Among the 16 are Zhipu.ai from China, and the Technology Innovation Institute from the United Arab Emirates. The presence of signatories from countries that have been less willing to bind national champions to safety regulation is a benefit of the lighter touch, the government says.

The longer the codes remained voluntary, however, the greater the risk was that AI companies would simply ignore them, said Fran Bennett, the interim director of the Ada Lovelace Institute.

Bennett also criticised the lack of transparency for training data. Even under the safety standards, companies are free to keep the data they train their models on completely secret, despite the risks known to come with biased or incomplete sources.

The full list of the companies to have signed up to the safety standards: