The Windfall Clause: Distributing the Benefits of AI for the Common Good

By Cullen O'Keefe, P. Cihon, Ben Garfinkel, Carrick Flynn, Jade Leung, Allan Dafoe. 2019

54 citations recorded by the source corpus.

As the transformative potential of AI has become increasingly salient as a matter of public and political interest, there has been growing discussion about the need to ensure that AI broadly benefits humanity. This in turn has spurred debate on the social responsibilities of large technology companies to serve the interests of society at large. In response, ethical principles and codes of conduct have been proposed to meet the escalating demand for this responsibility to be taken seriously. As yet, however, few institutional innovations have been suggested to translate this responsibility into legal commitments which apply to companies positioned to reap large financial gains from the development and use of AI. This paper offers one potentially attractive tool for addressing such issues: the Windfall Clause, which is an ex ante commitment by AI firms to donate a significant amount of any eventual extremely large profits. By this we mean an early commitment that profits that a firm could not earn without achieving fundamental, economically transformative breakthroughs in AI capabilities will be donated to benefit humanity broadly, with particular attention towards mitigating any downsides from deployment of windfall-generating AI.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

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Citations in the corpus

Toward Trustworthy AI Development: Mechanisms for Supporting Verifiable Claims (2020, background): “The Windfall Clause [30] is one proposal along these lines, and involves an ex ante commitment by AI firms to donate a significant amount of any eventual extremely large profits.”
Open Problems and Fundamental Limitations of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (2023, background): “There is an additional possibility that powerful AI systems will be highly profitable and serve to concentrate large amounts of wealth and power into the hands of a few [O’Keefe et al., 2020, Chan et al., 2023b].”