A call for a standards body to oversee the development of frontier artificial intelligence was voiced Tuesday by the CEO of Google DeepMind, an AI research lab.
"The Standards Body would be responsible for developing assessment protocols and working with appropriate federal agencies and the US National Labs to conduct testing in areas relevant to national security," Demis Hassabis wrote on LinkedIn.
He suggested the panel be modeled on a federally overseen public-private partnership or self-regulatory organization, like the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), and include independent leading technical experts and open-source representatives.
"At the moment, we are locked in an extremely intense, multilayered commercial and geopolitical race," he explained. "While these competitive dynamics fuel rapid progress and accelerate the incredible upsides, advances on the frontier are outpacing our understanding of the technology."
"Nobody in the world knows for sure what is going to happen from here, and even the experts disagree," he continued. "When there is a large degree of uncertainty and the stakes are this high, proceeding with cautious optimism is the sensible and correct strategy."
"That calls for public policy that promotes innovation while also incentivizing responsibility and security, fosters international collaboration on key safety issues, and encourages careful consideration of how AI is deployed for the benefit of society," he advised.
A standards body is certainly needed, declared Chris Canal, co-founder and CEO of EquiStamp , an AI safety company in Lewes, Del. "AI is a dual-use meta-technology," he told TechNewsWorld. "The same capabilities that accelerate drug discovery can lower the barrier to cyberattacks and bioweapons."
"Two things make pre-deployment standards non-negotiable," he said. "First, open-weight models cannot be recalled once released. The benefits and dangers an open-weight model provides exist permanently."
"Second," he continued, "labs like Anthropic and OpenAI already share non-public models with partners and testers before release, so a dangerous capability can be in circulation and cause harm before any government knows it exists."
Jeff Williams, CTO and co-founder of Contrast Security , a runtime security company in Los Altos, Calif., agreed that a standards body is needed to oversee AI development, particularly frontier AI. "These systems could ultimately pose risks comparable to nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons," he told TechNewsWorld. "We do not yet know how dangerous they will become, but the evidence is strong enough that waiting would be irresponsible."
He recommended that the approach be scientific, focused on measurable capabilities, and built on the work already underway in the security community. "The Open Worldwide Application Security Project [OWASP], in particular, has developed practical guidance across a broad range of generative and agentic AI risks," he said. "A standards body should fund, validate, and scale that work — not reinvent it behind closed doors."
"We need rigorous, standardized testing of frontier models," added Michelle Lopes Maldonado, associate director of AI policy at the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a research and public policy organization in Washington, D.C.
"The United States is already building that muscle," she told TechNewsWorld. "The Center for AI Standards and Innovation [CAISI] at NIST has pre-deploymen…