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Apple is the latest Silicon Valley giant to get in line with the White House’s voluntary commitments on AI safety as the iPhone maker readies its big Apple Intelligence release.
The company joins a slew of peers, including Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, in agreeing to ground rules around AI development, testing, and transparency, though experts have been skeptical about the pledges’ lack of teeth.
As for potentially more concrete rules, the White House also released an update last week on the deadlines it hit around the rollout of President Joe Biden’s sweeping AI executive order, which the federal government has been gradually implementing for around nine months now.
Ben Buchanan, the White House’s special advisor for AI, told Tech Brew that Apple’s commitment is a sign of the wide acceptance of these guidelines in the tech world.
“As [Apple] did their rollout of their big AI products and services in June, this was a natural outgrowth of that,” Buchanan said. “It shows that these commitments have really become the cornerstone of responsible AI innovation.”
Implementing Biden’s AI executive order has spanned everything from developing plans for federal agencies to use the technology to establishing a new AI Safety Institute and doling out resources for AI research. Buchanan said some of the greatest impact has come from how the order has addressed “safety, security, and trust,” including guidance from key agencies on avoiding bias and discrimination in AI.
Uncertain future: With presidential campaigns in full swing, there’s of course uncertainty about the future of any executive orders under a new administration, and the GOP has vowed to repeal Biden’s AI executive order if Donald Trump is elected. Buchanan says he is focused on implementation.
“I don’t spend a lot of time dealing with the politics of this, so we are basically just implementing the executive order. We’ve done 100% of deliverables on schedule,” Buchanan said. “I hope that what we’re doing in AI is bipartisan. So I don’t know folks who are against AI safety, security, and trust, so we’re just trying to do what the president told us to do in the executive order.”
Up-Hill climb: That said, Buchanan said there are limitations to how much the White House can accomplish through executive action and that legislation will be necessary to more thoroughly regulate AI. Such efforts in Congress seem to have lost steam for the time being in the runup to the election.
“I’m not sure how much [legislation is] going to happen in an election year, but the day after the president signed the executive order, he worked with the senators who are big proponents of AI work on Capitol Hill and had them in the Oval Office, and I thought it was a very productive conversation,” Buchanan said. “It hasn’t turned into legislation yet, but he has called time and again for bipartisan legislation in this area. And there’s things that we can’t do with executive authority. We will need Congress to act.”