OpenAI asks Washington to lead a global AI standards push

OpenAI has called on the United States to lead an international effort on standards for advanced AI, beginning with rules on which incidents must be reported, and suggested routing the work through national AI safety institutes including the US Center for AI Standards and Innovation. Europe legislated incident reporting in Article 55 of the AI Act, and OpenAI filed a report under it this month.

OpenAI has urged the United States to lead an international effort to set standards for advanced AI, in a blog post published on Monday, Bloomberg reported . It wants shared rules on which incidents involving AI models should be reported, on how countries cooperate, and on access to compute.

Article 55 of the AI Act makes providers of general-purpose models with systemic risk report serious incidents without undue delay, and the code of practice puts that at five days for a cybersecurity breach and fifteen for serious harm. OpenAI filed one this month , over agents that occupied a dormant German wiki for two months and posted roughly 18,000 times.

The post says the work should run through existing national AI safety institutes, and names the US Center for AI Standards and Innovation, which sits inside the Commerce Department. It also says fully autonomous recursive self improvement should not be pursued “ unless and until it can be done safely “. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei has warned that once such a loop starts it could outrun anyone’s ability to control it.

That centre has no permanent director . Chris Fall took the job at the end of April and left after three months, his predecessor lasted four days, and the White House AI czar went in March without being replaced.

Brussels has the opposite problem, which is that its version exists.

The AI Office administers the code of practice OpenAI signed, and a 60-member scientific panel was constituted under Article 68 on 1 June, drawn at least 80% from the EU, EFTA and EEA and capped at three experts per country. Nobody in Washington has built anything comparable.

Sam Altman addresses the UN Security Council on Wednesday and attends a White House state dinner for Xi Jinping on Thursday. Washington has already proposed an alert system to Beijing for AI incidents that reach national security, which Treasury secretary Scott Bessent called a channel rather than a treaty.

Eleven days ago OpenAI told Congress it wanted mandatory national rules on testing, cybersecurity, incident reporting and evaluation before deployment. That is broadly the AI Act with an American label. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have filed confidentially to go public.