Why Responsible AI Development Needs Cooperation on Safety

We've written a policy research paper identifying four strategies that can be used today to improve the likelihood of long-term industry cooperation on safety norms in AI: communicating risks and benefits, technical collaboration, increased transparency, and incentivizing standards. Our analysis shows that industry cooperation on safety will be instrumental in ensuring that AI systems are safe and beneficial, but competitive pressures could lead to a collective action problem, potentially causing AI companies to under-invest in safety. We hope these strategies will encourage greater cooperation on the safe development of AI and lead to better global outcomes of AI. It's important to ensure that it's in the economic interest of companies to build and release AI systems that are safe, secure, and socially beneficial. This is true even if we think AI companies and their employees have an independent desire to do this, since AI systems are more likely to be safe and beneficial if the economic interests of AI companies are not in tension with their desire to build their systems responsibly.