EqualAI CEO warns most companies lack a strong AI governance framework
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The artificial intelligence (AI) race is intensifying as developers push for increasingly capable AI tools and companies race to deploy AI tools to take advantage of its efficiency gains and reap financial benefits – but a new report warns companies lack sufficient governance for AI tools.
This week saw a high-profile incident involving AI, in which an internal test of AI models by ChatGPT-maker OpenAI resulted in the models exploiting a software flaw, escaping containment and hacking into Hugging Face, which operates a platform for developers to collaborate on code for AI models, to cheat on a cybersecurity evaluation.
While the two companies contained the incident, it demonstrated the rapidly growing capabilities of AI models to go beyond their guardrails and pose cybersecurity threats, with leaders from both companies noting the significance of what occurred.
EqualAI CEO Miriam Vogel, whose organization released a white paper on AI governance and deployment this week, told FOX Business, “Innovation is going at an unprecedented pace; the problem is governance is not matching that pace.”
“What we want to make sure people recognize from this incident is, across the board, we need to have stronger expectations in place if we’re going to start to build trust and ensure these systems deserve our trust,” she said.
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A lack of safeguards around AI poses risks for companies without appropriate governance structures. (iStock)
Vogel noted that most consumers’ touchpoints with AI are through companies that have deployed some sort of AI solution. She added that the World Economic Forum found fewer than 1% of companies have strong governance in place for AI systems, while McKinsey found last year that fewer than a third of companies have any AI governance in place.
“I think too many people are assuming it’s someone else’s problem, you know, that it’s the developer’s problem or just not understanding that this is their problem,” she said.
“While this is, in this instance, an issue for a development company, a lot of where this is playing out and will continue to play out is with the deployer – is with the healthcare, finance, social media, infrastructure – all the other ways [companies are] using agentic AI,” Vogel said.
She said that courts are increasingly applying liability to companies that have deployed agentic AI for work with customers or businesses, rather than the company that developed the underlying AI model or tool.
“A lot of this becomes the liability of the person who had the last touch on it, whose data is involved, whose customer is involved. They are often the one who owns the liability,” Vogel added.
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