Schellman CEO: the giant loophole in the White House AI deal
Fortune · Avani Desai ·
Who audits the AI auditors?
The White House recently brought together some of the world’s largest AI companies around an important commitment: independent oversight of the safeguards designed to keep their systems safe. The accord, released on Sept. 29, calls on developers to monitor risks, establish internal controls and bring in outside auditors or evaluators to assess whether those controls work. It’s an encouraging development for an industry where companies have largely been responsible for evaluating their own technology.
But the agreement leaves a critical gap. It calls for independent assessments without defining who qualifies to conduct them, what independence requires or how conflicts of interest should be handled. Without those standards, two developers could fulfill the same commitment through assessments with vastly different levels of rigor and objectivity, leaving businesses and regulators uncertain about how much confidence to place in the results.
At Schellman, we provide accredited AI assurance, and we’ve seen firsthand why the credibility of that work depends on independence, clear scope and qualified professionals. The assurance profession has spent decades establishing standards for competency, independence and quality oversight across financial reporting, cybersecurity and privacy. Those standards exist because an independent opinion is only as credible as the people conducting the assessment and the evidence supporting their conclusions. Independence isn’t something you simply declare. It’s something you have to demonstrate.