What Should the Rules for A.I. Companies Actually Be? We Asked the Experts.

What should the government do? We asked a panel of experts to assess the risks A.I. presents and the tools of governance that could be adopted to address them.

Kate Brennan, a former Google tech worker, leads the policy agenda on A.I. and corporate power at the AI Now Institute, an independent research institute providing expert analysis on A.I. in the public interest.

Brennan: Here’s what I see as the biggest risk: These companies are spending so much money on building out this technology. The consulting firm Bain estimates that by 2031, they will have to achieve $6 trillion of revenue annually to sustain their current level of capital expenditure, which is $1.5 trillion a year. In order for those numbers to add up in any way, they need to push this tech everywhere, into all of our public institutions and contracting, including in areas where A.I. is not fit for purpose, is not secure, safe by design. That’s what we should be talking about.

Brennan: Government is supposed to stop harmful products from entering the market. We do it with drugs. We do it with airplanes. The issue here is corporate negligence. That should be the focus.

Brennan: There is a really compelling case that if your product causes significant harm, whether that’s injury to people, death, cybersecurity attacks, then you could be held strictly liable — meaning whether or not you knew or should have known the danger. That’s on the table for A.I., which speaks to how much advocacy over the past months has turned attention to corporate negligence rather than abstract risk.

Read the full roundtable discussion here.