The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has issued new instructions to scientists that partner with the US Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute (AISI) that eliminate mention of "AI safety," "responsible AI," and "AI fairness" in the skills it expects of members and introduces a request to prioritize "reducing ideological bias, to enable human flourishing and economic competitiveness." The information comes as part of an updated cooperative research and development agreement for AI Safety Institute consortium members, sent in early March. Previously, that agreement encouraged researchers to contribute technical work that could help identify and fix discriminatory model behavior related to gender, race, age, or wealth inequality. Such biases are hugely important because they can directly affect end users and disproportionately harm minorities and economically disadvantaged groups. The new agreement removes mention of developing tools "for authenticating content and tracking its provenance" as well as "labeling synthetic content," signaling less interest in tracking misinformation and deep fakes.

Governments, industry, and other actors involved in governing AI technologies around the world agree that, while AI offers tremendous promise to benefit the world, appropriate guardrails are required to mitigate risks. Global institutions, including the OECD, the G7, the G20, UNESCO, and the Council of Europe, have already started developing frameworks for ethical and responsible AI governance. While these are important initial steps, they alone fall short of addressing the need for institutionalised international processes to identify and assess potentially harmful AI capabilities. Contributing to the relevant conversation on how to address this gap, this chapter reflects on what functions an international AI safety institute could perform. Based on the analysis of both existing international governance models addressing safety considerations in adjacent policy areas and the newly established national AI safety institutes in the UK and US, the chapter identifies a list of concrete functions that could be performed at the international level. While creating a new international body is not the only way forward, understanding the structure of these bodies from a modular perspective can help us to identify the tools at our disposal. These, we suggest, can be categorised under three functional domains: a) technical research and cooperation, b) safeguards and evaluations, c) policymaking and governance support.

OpenAI will give the US AI Safety Institute early access to its next model as part of its safety efforts, Sam Altman has revealed in a tweet. Apparently, the company has been working with the consortium "to push forward the science of AI evaluations." The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has formally established the Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute earlier this year, though Vice President Kamala Harris announced it back in 2023 at the UK AI Safety Summit. Based on the NIST's description of the consortium, it's meant "to develop science-based and empirically backed guidelines and standards for AI measurement and policy, laying the foundation for AI safety across the world." The company, along with DeepMind, similarly pledged to share AI models with the UK government last year.

The frontier of AI just got pushed a little further forward. On Friday, Anthropic, the AI lab set up by a team of disgruntled OpenAI staffers, released the latest version of its Claude LLM. The company said Thursday that the new model – the technology that underpins its popular chatbot Claude – is twice as fast as its most powerful previous version. Anthropic said in its evaluations, the model outperforms leading competitors like OpenAI on several key intelligence capabilities, such as coding and text-based reasoning. Anthropic only released the previous version of Claude, 3.0, in March.

Until mid-2023, artificial intelligence was something of a niche topic in Washington, largely confined to small circles of tech-policy wonks. That all changed when, nearly two years into Gina Raimondo's tenure as Secretary of Commerce, ChatGPT's explosive popularity catapulted AI into the spotlight. Raimondo, however, was ahead of the curve. "I make it my business to stay on top of all of this," she says during an interview in her wood-paneled office overlooking the National Mall on May 21. "None of it was shocking to me." But in the year since, even she has been startled by the pace of progress.

The Bletchley Park artificial intelligence summit in 2023 was a landmark event in AI regulation simply by virtue of its existence. Between the event's announcement and its first day, the mainstream conversation had changed from a tone of light bafflement to a general agreement that AI regulation may be worth discussing. However, the task for its follow-up, held at a research park on the outskirts of Seoul this week, is harder: can the UK and South Korea show that governments are moving from talking about AI regulation to actually delivering it? At the end of the Seoul summit, the big achievement the UK was touting was the creation of a global network of AI safety institutes, building on the British trailblazers founded after the last meeting. The technology secretary, Michelle Donelan, attributed the new institutes to the "Bletchley effect" in action, and announced plans to lead a system whereby regulators in the US, Canada, Britain, France, Japan, Korea, Australia, Singapore and the EU share information about AI models, harms and safety incidents.

The UK is leading an international effort to test the most advanced AI models for safety risks before they hit the public, as regulators race to create a workable safety regime before the Paris summit in six months. Britain's AI Safety Institute, the first of its kind, is now matched by counterparts from around the world, including South Korea, the US, Singapore, Japan and France. Regulators at the Seoul AI Summit hope the bodies can collaborate to create the 21st-century version of the Montreal Protocol, the groundbreaking agreement to control CFCs and close the hole in the ozone layer. But before they do, the institutes need to agree on how they can work together to turn an international patchwork of approaches and regulations into a unified effort to corral AI research. "At Bletchley, we announced the UK's AI Safety Institute – the world's first government-backed organisation dedicated to advanced AI safety for the public good," said Michelle Donelan, the UK technology secretary, in Seoul on Wednesday.

This week, artificial intelligence caught up with the future – or at least Hollywood's idea of it from a decade ago. "It feels like AI from the movies," wrote the OpenAI chief executive, Sam Altman, of his latest system, an impressive virtual assistant. To underline his point he posted a single word on X – "her" – referring to the 2013 film starring Joaquin Phoenix as a man who falls in love with a futuristic version of Siri or Alexa, voiced by Scarlett Johansson. For some experts, that new AI, GPT-4o, will be an unsettling reminder of their concerns about the technology's rapid advances, with a key OpenAI safety researcher leaving this week following a disagreement over the company's direction. For others the GPT-4o release will be confirmation that innovation continues in a field promising benefits for all. Next week's global AI summit in Seoul, attended by ministers, experts and tech executives, will hear both perspectives, as underlined by a safety report released before the meeting that referred to potential positives as well as numerous risks.

Elizabeth Kelly, formerly an economic policy adviser to President Joe Biden, has been named as director of the newly formed U.S. Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute (USAISI), U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo announced Wednesday. "For the United States to lead the world in the development of safe, responsible AI, we need the brightest minds at the helm," said Raimondo. "Thanks to President Biden's leadership, we're in a position of power to meet the challenges posed by AI, while fostering America's greatest strength: innovation." Kelly has previously contributed to the Biden Administration's efforts to regulate AI with the AI Executive Order, which an Administration official tells TIME she was involved in the development of from the beginning. Kelly was "a driving force behind the domestic components of the AI executive order, spearheading efforts to promote competition, protect privacy, and support workers and consumers, and helped lead Administration engagement with allies and partners on AI governance," according to a press release announcing her appointment. Read More: Why Biden's AI Executive Order Only Goes So Far Previously, Kelly was special assistant to the President for economic policy at the White House National Economic Council.

Following President Joe Biden's sweeping executive order regarding AI development last week, at the UK AI Safety Summit yesterday, Vice President Kamala Harris announced even more machine learning initiatives, as well as the establishment of the United States AI Safety Institute. In cooperation with the Department of Commerce, the Biden administration will establish the United States AI Safety Institute (US AISI) within the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology). It will be responsible for creating and publishing guidelines, benchmark tests, best practices and more, for evaluating potentially dangerous AI systems. Tests may even include the red-team exercises President Biden mentioned in his executive order last week. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) -- it's an acronym-heavy morning -- will release the administration's first draft policy guidance on government AI use later this week.