“They’re moving in the right direction and they’re moving beyond words. I think that’s all helpful,” the staffer said. The person added that the next few weeks “will be critical to see sort of how those firm commitments translate to actual legislation that the entire industry would be regulated by.”
Who watches the watchers?
At the same time, powerful voices in the venture capitalist community continue to push back against the idea of third-party AI evaluators.
Jeremy Kudon, executive director of the American Innovators Network — a lobbying group for “little tech” funded by venture capital giants Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator — said the idea “leaves important questions like standards and the developing body of those standards unanswered all while being potentially developed and implemented without a public hearing or industry input.”
In a statement to POLITICO, Kudon worried that smaller AI companies and startups would struggle to navigate requirements to embed outside auditors.
Venture capitalist and former White House AI czar David Sacks took aim at Model Evaluation and Threat Research, an AI risk auditing nonprofit that Anthropic’s Amodei specifically named as a viable example of an independent evaluator.
“Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff,” Sacks told Amodei and Altman in an X post during the weekend. Sacks continues to have the ear of Trump, who on Monday accused AI industry leaders of propagating a “hoax” that their technology could harm humanity.
In an interview with POLITICO, METR President Chris Painter acknowledged that his organization contains substantial ties to researchers at Anthropic and OpenAI, as well as some links to the effective altruist ideology. He called it a natural, if unfortunate, outgrowth of hiring researchers who work at the cutting edge of AI development and alignment.
“If you’re trying to hire and build a team of people that is focused on informing the public about risks that might come from like AI autonomy and loss of control, and you’re doing that in a period, in an era where not much of the world is paying attention to that issue, you are going to inherently have this problem of hiring the people who are early to caring about that,” Painter said.