Apple has signed onto the White House’s voluntary commitment to develop safe, secure and trustworthy AI, joining 15 other leading technology companies. This step comes as Apple prepares to launch its generative AI offering, Apple Intelligence, which will be integrated into its core products, reaching its two billion users.
The commitment, originally established in July 2023, already includes reputed companies such as Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI. These companies have agreed to a series of measures aimed at ensuring the responsible development of AI technologies.
US President Biden’s AI executive order in October further reinforced these efforts, with more comprehensive regulations expected in the future. By joining this initiative, Apple has signaled its readiness to comply with evolving AI standards and regulations.
Under the voluntary commitment, participating companies have pledged to conduct rigourous red-teaming of their AI models before public release and to make the results of these tests publicly available. They have also committed to handling AI model weights with high confidentiality, working on them in secure environments, and limiting access to a small number of employees. Additionally, they will develop content labeling systems, such as watermarking, to help users distinguish AI-generated content from human-created material.
The US Department of Commerce is set to release a report examining the potential benefits, risks, and implications of open-source foundation models. The debate around open-source AI is heating up, with some advocating for restricted access to powerful AI model weights to enhance safety, while others argue that such limitations could hinder innovation within the AI startup and research communities. The White House’s position on this issue is likely to influence the broader AI industry.
US federal agencies have already made decent progress since the issuance of the October executive order. Over 200 AI-related hires have been made, more than 80 research teams have been granted access to computational resources and several frameworks for AI development have been released, as per reports.
