Big Tech's AI auditors will only see what they're shown
If the White House accord's audits are going to be worth anything, auditors should be able to choose what they test, writes Samuel Vance-Law, head of research at the Decentralization Research Center.
Last week, six of the most powerful AI companies in the world promised the White House they would let outsiders check their work.
On Sept. 29, Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and xAI signed an accord on the most advanced AI models that U.S. President Donald Trump called "morally binding." Each company has promised it will "partner with an independent external auditor or evaluator" and have independent board members review the auditors' reports and make sure problems get fixed.
Outside audits are a good idea, and I'm glad to see them in there. But the accord says nothing about who chooses the auditors, what they can examine or whether any findings are made public; there's no penalty for ignoring it. As it stands, each company picks its own auditor and decides what that auditor gets to look at.
In 2000, Enron paid accounting firm Arthur Andersen — once part of the so-called “Big Five” of international accounting firms, now the “Big Four” after Arthur Andersen’s implosion — $25 million to audit its books and another $27 million for tax and consulting work. Within two years, both firms had collapsed. Congress responded with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which took the choice of auditor away from management, stopped auditors from selling most other services to the companies they audit and set up a public board to inspect the auditors themselves.
Andersen failed not due to a deficit in expertise, but in an incentive to look hard at a client paying it $52 million in a single year. Voluntary pledges in the AI industry don't have a great record, either. In 2023, the leading AI companies made a set of voluntary commitments to the White House, including letting outside experts test their systems before release. When researchers at Stanford, Harvard and Brown went back and scored 16 companies against those commitments, the average came to 53%. On the promise to help outsiders find and report problems, eight of the 16 scored zero.
Even when outside testing does happen, the developer sets the terms. METR, a nonprofit that tests AI models, wrote that its testing of OpenAI's o3 model before release was "conducted over only three weeks," with "limited access to information about the model" and no view of the model's step-by-step reasoning.