OpenAI supports US Congress bills on AI and biological weapon threats

OpenAI is endorsing a series of bipartisan bills before the U.S. Congress that the company says will help to prevent artificial intelligence models from accelerating the threat of biological weapons and synthetic viruses, a company spokesperson said on Tuesday.

The ChatGPT-maker is endorsing the Web of Biological Data Act, the AI-Ready Bio-Data Standards Act and the Scale Biology Act, the spokesperson said. Politico earlier reported the endorsements.

OpenAI is also backing a key provision of the FRONTIER Act that requires leading AI companies to embed independent evaluators to assess the safety of their models, the spokesperson said.

Concerns about advanced AI have escalated, with heads of top U.S. AI labs including OpenAI also calling for a slowdown in the pace of advanced AI development.

Last week, OpenAI said it ​was pushing for mandatory national AI safety requirements in the United States.

-Reporting by Gnaneshwar Rajan and Chandni Shah in Bengaluru; Editing by Chris Reese and Edmund Klamann/Reuters