Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen reportedly cast doubt on whether AI companies would honour a voluntary safety pledge agreed after a meeting with US President Donald Trump last week.
Haugen told CNBC OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, Meta Platforms, Microsoft and Google needed to “step up and comply” with the AI agreement.
“The history of tech companies engaging with regulation is: Often they will follow the exact written statement when we are dealing with very flexible systems,” Haugen told CNBC.
She questioned whether the companies would follow the “spirit of the rules” or exploit conduct that was not expressly prohibited to “go around the end of the fence”.
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Haugen pointed to Anthropic and CEO Dario Amodei’s support for independent auditors as evidence companies were addressing safety more proactively as concerns about AI posing an existential risk intensified.
“I think that is an acknowledgement that at least Dario knows that if you’re given the space to cut corners, even the angels among us begin to cut corners,” Haugen told CNBC.
In 2021, Haugen, who previously worked as a product manager on Facebook’s civic misinformation team, provided internal documents to the Wall Street Journal, prompting a series of reports known as The Facebook Files.
The documents included evidence the company knew its platforms were harming teenagers’ mental health.
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