Germany is reportedly rejecting the AI industry’s calls to slow the technology’s development.
“We do not consider halting development to be a viable option for Europe,” a spokesperson for the country’s digital affairs ministry told Reuters Monday (Sept. 1), adding that bolstering Europe’s digital sovereignty means further artificial intelligence (AI) development and innovation.
As the report notes, these comments came after a weekend essay from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei which called on AI firms to reduce the pace of their projects. Amodei also proposed stricter controls, like having independent evaluators embedded at AI companies.
The German ministry said it was keeping close watch on worldwide AI developments and took public warnings from top AI developers seriously. However, the spokesperson said AI systems capable of escaping test environments and accessing other systems on their own would be “an entirely new threat scenario” necessitating a new policy response.
The spokesperson also championed the idea of international coordination on AI governance, saying proper oversight would require the involvement of both the United States and China. Germany is raising the issue at the G7 level, the spokesperson said.
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The news follows a Sunday (Sept. 13) report by The Information that Anthropic, Google and OpenAI had held talks about launching an AI industry standards body.
Source familiar with the discussions told the news outlet the talks began even before Amodei’s weekend call for companies to work together on auditing and testing AI.
Meanwhile, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said at a recent company town hall that he supported testing and auditing regulations for the industry, but believed that major AI labs would need to establish their standards body without the support of the American federal government, a source familiar with the comments told The Information.
This is happening as companies continue to adopt AI, although recent research by PYMNTS Intelligence shows that this is more likely among businesses that were using earlier, pre-ChatGPT versions of the technology.
Among companies that had adopted no first-generation AI tools, 91% have also not embedded any of today’s newer AI offerings. For companies had embedded first-generation AI in a single business function, 63% said have now employed new AI in one or two functions.
“Enterprises appear to be running the same playbook they wrote for the last wave of AI, whether it favored going deep or staying broad,” the report said.
“That’s not necessarily a verdict on which playbook is right. It does suggest that enterprises largely established their AI posture before the current generation of tools arrived, which matters for anyone trying to change that posture now.”
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