AI safety experts urge shift from personality-based trust to institutional regulation

Miles_Brundage · x · 2026-08-17

Neuroscientist Joshua Saxe commented that it's a fortunate quirk of history that AI industry leaders are more values-driven and safety-conscious than average executives, but as AI companies scale and go public, they will behave like typical capitalist entities producing negative externalities. Therefore, the safety industry must move from a premodern reliance on personalities to a Weberian rules-based bureaucracy, with uniform governance of model safety testing, know-your-customer, and model weight security, to avoid the fox guarding the henhouse.

Quoting @tszzl, model training companies freeload off NGOs like METR, Redwood, and Apollo, offloading alignment externalities without adequate funding. These organizations maintain independence by refusing lab money, but a third party (like Coefficient Giving) could credibly channel donations from lab employees or labs to promising organizations.

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