Elon Musk deal with AI safety office persists amid DOGE scrutiny
Illustration: Allie Carl/Axios
Elon Musk's xAI signed an agreement to work with the U.S. AI Safety Institute as his DOGE efforts have taken aim at the office's future.
Why it matters: Musk's business dealings run deep with government contracts, investigations and partnerships, raising a flurry of conflict of interest concerns.
- AISI had been bracing for Musk's DOGE cuts, as we previously reported, and seemed especially vulnerable given it's made up mostly of probationary employees.
- But the office has so far been spared, thanks to congressional pushback, general support for it among the tech industry, and staff there having technical expertise.
Driving the news: Ben Buchanan, an AI adviser under the Biden administration, said on The Ezra Klein Show on Tuesday that AISI has a memorandum of understanding with Musk's xAI, the company behind Grok.
- AISI has MOUs with various AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI that are designed to establish voluntary research, testing and evaluation collaboration.
- The MOU with xAI was negotiated and signed under the Biden administration, sources familiar told Axios. It's not clear whether AISI was involved in xAI's latest release, Grok 3, which came out last month.
- xAI and NIST did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The big picture: AISI is one of the many government entities in the middle of dealing with tech billionaire Musk.
- Some industry watchers and former government officials told Axios that xAI being partnered with AISI is a good sign for the entity's fate under the Trump administration.
What we're watching: Unlike partnerships with other AI companies, the deal with xAI was never publicly announced.
- It's unclear whether xAI has offered the Grok system to the government for testing, as other companies have, or if xAI being involved with AISI will shift its safety efforts in another direction given Musk and the Trump administration's desire to hit the gas on AI development.
- In announcing Anthropic's latest release, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, the company mentioned pre-deployment testing of the model with AISI and the U.K. AI Security Institute as part of its partnerships with those two agencies.
