The Labs' Self-Regulator Takes Shape: SAFA Named, Chair Shortlisted — But "Nothing Has Launched"
Update (Sept 26): the Standards Authority for Frontier AI (SAFA) has a name, a shortlist, and still no charter. TheStreet (Sept 26) reports the OpenAI–Anthropic–Google DeepMind body — target window late 2026/early 2027 — has shortlisted Condoleezza Rice and venture capitalist David Friedberg for chair, with Sriram Krishnan (current administration AI adviser) and Arati Prabhakar (former Biden science office director) on the CEO shortlist — a deliberately bipartisan slate. Key planned guidelines: third-party testing before models ship, rules for how labs report safety incidents, and a framework that turns voluntary safety pledges into something "that can actually be checked."
New details on how it got here:
- The companies initially wanted a public-private partnership with federal oversight; that stalled after a draft White House executive order was put on hold — the administration told the companies to reach industry consensus first.
- The idea traces to Demis Hassabis's July proposal for a FINRA-modeled body, industry-funded.
- Meta, xAI, and Nvidia pushed back publicly at Dreamforce on Sept 15 — "SAFA is a deal among three labs, not a consensus across the whole field."
- TheStreet's bottom line: "Nothing has launched. No charter. No confirmed leader." And the FINRA comparison has a catch — FINRA can punish brokers; SAFA, without government registration, "probably cannot" enforce.
What it means: the bilateral OpenAI–Anthropic stress-test pact reported Sept 21 has widened into a three-lab body with a governance shortlist, but the enforcement question is unanswered — the biggest labs write the rules and get audited against them, while smaller competitors and open-source developers face a bar they didn't set. This is the industry-led track of the The Pacing Debate Ships Product: OpenAI Kills GPT-6.1, Nvidia Ships Agent Containment, the Market Starts Pricing the Slowdown running parallel to the stalled federal one (AI Czar Named: DNI Jay Clayton to Chair the "Super Intelligence Force" — a 120-Day Report, Not a Regulator); the White House's own AI-czar/AI Force structure remains unannounced.