The AI Safety Crunch and How Enterprises Should Deal With It

Worased Boontipchayakun via Getty Images

The AI market’s existential safety reckoning is a fast-developing issue that enterprises should pay attention to.

However, even as major AI vendors call for mandatory national regulation of AI, enterprises should focus on preparing their organizations for potential change.

OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane on Wednesday authored a blog post calling on global policymakers to act to contain AI risk. Lehane said OpenAI is pushing for mandatory national AI safety requirements and supporting four California bills, including one for a framework for independent safety assessments, as well as two that California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, signed into law on, also on Wednesday. The AI vendor said it is willing to work with other frontier labs to advance AI safety standards, undertake more self-regulation and advocate for collaborative international approaches to measuring capabilities, managing risk and preserving human control of AI technology.

For enterprises that are watching the safety debate, the best course of action is to have safety built into the risk tier of how organizations are using the technology, said Lauren Kornutick, an analyst at Gartner.

“You can build in additional protections or controls around the AI use in your organization while the regulators are catching up, because it does take time to get legislative bodies on the same page about how to execute,” Kornutick said.

Meanwhile, the OpenAI policy statement comes as the AI market faces growing alarm about the risks of the technology after separate incidents in which agents powered by models from OpenAI and Anthropic escaped their sandbox environments. The incidents highlighted just how little is still known about AI systems.

The Competitive Landscape

He added that competition among companies means that asking vendors to self-regulate or voluntarily stop pursuing technological progress is not the answer.