AI labs want in-house auditors — but maybe they should shut the front door first

Last weekend, after one of his researchers resigned over fears that AI could lead to human extinction, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote about the need for outside organizations “to verify adherence to safety practices and commitments, report incidents, and help assess the alignment of not just completed AI models but training pipelines and processes.” Executives at OpenAI, Google and SpaceXAI have already rallied around Amodei’s plan, which has quickly become a central pillar of the emerging AI safety push.

But there may be a simpler and more effective fix hiding in plain sight. Internet security experts say the labs need to focus on network security basics like logs and permissions, applying the same rigorous defenses they do for human users. It’s not as exciting as third-party auditing and alignment work—but it may end up being more effective.

“To me, it seems like they’re outsourcing,” Kate Moussoris, the CEO of Luta Security, told TechCrunch of Amodei’s proposal. “Saying [a third-party audit] is the solution is a strange proposition from my perspective. It would be the same as if, instead of writing the Trustworthy Computing Memo, Microsoft said, let’s slow down development.”

That memo, written by then-Microsoft CEO Bill Gates in 2002, called on his employees to ensure that their software would be reliable and safe following a series of widely-publicized computer worms that took over then-nascent enterprise systems. The AI sector may be at a similar turning point, as the value and risk of the new technology becomes increasingly clear.