Google Deepmind CEO Demis Hassabis has published a detailed framework proposal for governing advanced AI.
Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is likely just a few years away, according to Hassabis, who just repeated a claim he made in April: the impact could be ten times greater than the Industrial Revolution and arrive ten times faster. At the same time, progress is outpacing our understanding of the technology. Back in May, the Deepmind chief saw humanity already "in the foothills of the singularity," a widely debated statement.
Now, Hassabis proposes a new US standards body modeled after the financial regulator FINRA. It would develop evaluation protocols for frontier models, starting on a voluntary basis and later becoming mandatory. The agency would be funded by industry and use regularly updated benchmarks. The international community would then need to follow suit and find consensus on the most critical points.
If necessary, the body could also coordinate a slowdown in development, similar to what Anthropic recently considered. Hassabis stresses that non-frontier models from startups or academic research would be exempt. That sidesteps the accusation of "regulatory capture," where established companies try to use regulation to hold back smaller competitors.
