The Business Case for AI Safety Is Customer Adoption.

AI Safety has been in the news a lot lately, due in part to rogue AI agents. This has led to industry calls for some form of industry or government imposed standards. In July 2026 Demis Hassabis, Chair of Google DeepMind, wrote on X about the need for an industry-funded, federally overseen AI Standards Body. In September 2026 Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, wrote on his blog about the need for slower-paced AI development in order to continue “building AI at a balanced rate that aims to ensure its safety while still achieving its benefits.” OpenAI has said it supports parts of proposed legislation to establish a federal framework for AI safety. On the other hand, President Trump has expressed clear distaste for AI safety, worrying it will hinder U.S. businesses, a concern shared by others. There is however a business case for AI safety: credible safeguards can support further adoption and follow-on innovation.

Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and other leading AI companies discussing AI safety might sound familiar. In 2023 these same companies and others agreed to a set of voluntary AI safety commitments proposed by the Biden Administration. Some of the 2023 commitments are quite similar to what the companies are now proposing. For example, the first of the 2023 commitments was to “commit to internal and external security testing of their AI systems before their release.” I noted at the time that the voluntary commitments lacked clarity around which external parties would do the testing, and which criteria would be used.

That AI safety is in the news so much lately, and that leading AI companies are now calling for many of the same commitments that were voluntarily agreed upon three years ago, suggest that those 2023 commitments did not have their intended impact. Why should we expect anything different this time around; what, if anything, has changed?

Read the full Forbes article.
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Robert Seamans is Associate Professor of Management and Organizations and Director of the Center for the Future of Management