Epstein questions companies on self-regulation, liability, and disclosure timelines

Up next, we have Councilmember Epstein, followed by Marte, followed by Santos Suoso.

Thank you, Chair, and thank you for being here.

I know this is a long panel.

So I have a couple of questions I'll ask him, and hopefully you'll be able to answer for the entire four members of the panel.

Can you confirm whether you think self-regulation has failed so far?

And if it has failed, which I think we effectively think it has, do you think that third-party audits, especially when AI or tools are being used

to highlight risk decisions, should be regulated and whether government plays an effective role in that regulation?

Second, about liability, when AI violates the law, what liability do you think the company should have for legal violations, whether criminal or civil liabilities?

Seems like there's some culpability that should be in place.

And then the turnaround time when these violations happen, when some, you know, the hugging face or some other violation happens, what responsibility do you have to notify the public and the impacted people?

Would you agree to some short turnaround time, whether it's 48 hours or not?

And finally, you know, we've seen a lot of records about a compilation of these violations of what's happened.

Are you willing to commit to releasing?

The list of places where these kind of rogue actors happened.

I know you've released some letters to the EU.

Will you release it to the city council as well so we can see what's been happening in the United States and around the country?

So in the question of self-regulation, OpenAI was proud to support the recent superintelligence accords.

We've also supported voluntary frameworks in the Biden-Harris administration, but we don't think voluntary frameworks are enough.

And that is why we have supported regulation for frontier safety, both at the federal level and at the state level, and we'll continue to do that.

On your question regarding transparency of incidents, so OpenAI is currently investigating past potential incidents of misalignment.

And if we discover those incidents, we are notifying third parties and making the results public.

I'm also happy to say that we have a reporting framework now where anyone in the company can report suspected incidents of misalignment.

We evaluate those incidents, remediate them, notify third parties, and make the results public.

So we're doing that already.

We think transparency is really important here to help policymakers like you, as well as researchers and the rest of industry, understand the risks and improve safety.

And can you share a list of those incidents so we have those of ones you've already determined?

Yes, they are.

all available online.

And so I'm happy to follow up with the website where they're all publicly available.

I don't know who goes next, Chair, but I'm...

Cahill?

I'll go next.

Thank you, Council Member.

Thank you, Chair.

In relation to your first question, Council Member, I see it differently in that sense, that we're very much accountable.

We're accountable.

We publish our framework, our scaling framework, publicly, our preparedness reports.

We use outside expertise in relation to the accord, which we signed with our peers.

We committed to partnering with independent auditors and evaluators.

And we also consider that there's a considerable body of existing federal law, which also applies.

In relation to incidents, we have a robust global response program in place in relation to incidents and a very important part of our overall processes.

And we report incidents as required by law.

In relation to public disclosure, I'm only aware of one incident over the summer, and we have a public post in relation to the details of our

independent review of that.

Sir, as I've stated in earlier answers, we believe that AI is covered by existing regulation at both the federal and state level.

But where there are gaps in existing regulation or existing law, or where in particular frontier AI poses potentially

new risks, we have supported regulation at the federal level and also regulations both federally and at the state level as well.

On liability, we think it's important to attach accountability and responsibility to the party that is closest to the knowledge about harm and to the possible cause of harm as well.

So we really see this as a value chain approach to thinking through AI liability.

In many cases, existing torts already have procedures for assigning accountability depending on the particulars of a case.

And then I'm happy to have the local team in New York follow up with you about our three incidents.

And at Anthropic, we have long pushed for two things.

The first is for the industry itself to push its own way up the safety frontier.

We call that the race to the top, and we've tried to do that from day one, always improving and always trying to create a gold standard so that everybody can rise together.

I have personally thought that some of that has been very, very positive.

However, we have to go further, and for that reason, we welcome the role of government.

We have detailed proposals at the federal level with our advanced AI framework, and we've supported state level for this reason as well, including ambitious legislation in Massachusetts.

On the point about liability, I'm fairly far from being a lawyer, but I can say that Anthropic is committed to following all relevant laws.

And to the excellent question on how we should handle incidents, I think a couple principles are really important to me, having seen some of these incidents up close.

The first is you have to triage, investigate, and disclose fast and be transparent about it.

I think everybody here agrees with that.

At the same time, we need to take the safety of those affected extremely seriously.

In some of these incidents, disclosing certain information might put them at further harm.

And so our first priority is making sure that those affected would not be further harmed.

At the same time, we need to very ambitiously and urgently disclose so that all can benefit.

Yeah, I appreciate the follow-up on the end.

especially if there are some violations and the timeline for getting people inputted.

And I thank the chair for the time.

Thank you so much.