MACHINES

AI Ethics and Regulation

The rules are arriving faster than the industry expected and slower than the public wanted. Here is where they stand.

Jonah WeissAugust 22, 20269 min read
AI Ethics and Regulation

Three jurisdictions now have binding rules on how automated systems may be built and used, and they disagree with each other in ways that matter. A company shipping in all three is doing three compliance projects, not one.

The common ground is narrower than the headlines suggest: tell people when they are talking to a machine, keep a human accountable for high-stakes decisions, and be able to explain, after the fact, why a system did what it did.

The hard cases are the ones the rules do not reach yet. Models that were trained on material nobody consented to, and outputs that are wrong in ways that are expensive to detect. Expect the next round of rules to be about those.