Tech giants pledge AI safety commitments — including a ‘kill switch’ if they can’t mitigate risks

Major tech companies, including Microsoft, Amazon, and OpenAI, came together in a landmark international agreement on artificial intelligence safety at the Seoul AI Safety Summit on Tuesday.

In light of the agreement, companies from various countries, including the U.S., China, Canada, the U.K., France, South Korea, and the United Arab Emirates, will make voluntary commitments to ensure the safe development of their most advanced AI models.

Where they have not done so already, AI model makers agreed to publish safety frameworks laying out how they'll measure the challenges of their frontier models, such as preventing misuse of the technology by bad actors.

These frameworks will include "red lines" for the tech firms that define the kinds of risks associated with frontier AI systems, which would be considered "intolerable." These risks include but aren't limited to automated cyberattacks and the threat of bioweapons.

To respond to such extreme circumstances, companies said they plan to implement a "kill switch" that would cease the development of their AI models if they can't guarantee mitigation of these risks.

"It's a world first to have so many leading AI companies from so many different parts of the globe all agreeing to the same commitments on AI safety," Rishi Sunak, the U.K.'s prime minister, said in a statement Tuesday.

"These commitments ensure the world's leading AI companies will provide transparency and accountability on their plans to develop safe AI," he added.

The pact on Tuesday expands on a previous set of commitments made by companies involved in the development of generative AI software last November.

The companies have agreed to take input on these thresholds from "trusted actors," including their home