Scaling Laws Why AI Needs Independent Auditors, with Miles Brundage
Apr 14, 2026
Miles Brundage, founding executive director of AVERI and former OpenAI advisor, explains why independent audits are needed for frontier AI. He discusses shifting audits from models to organizations. He highlights deception-proofing evaluations, a ladder of AI assurance levels, and market levers like insurance and procurement to drive adoption.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
Transparency Rules Without Quality Are Insufficient
- Current transparency-focused laws often require documents but not quality, letting companies publish weak or meaningless safety policies.
- Miles Brundage contrasted California's SB 53 and New York's RAISE Act, noting they lack strong verification and meaningful penalties to ensure real safety practices.
Lost Time Means We May Only Regulate The Biggest Firms
- Delaying regulatory demand signals slows building an audit ecosystem and risks only being able to regulate the top few firms as capabilities get cheaper.
- Brundage argued that 2025 lost time: cheaper compute means regulators should scale to top 100 firms, not just top 10.
Why Miles Left OpenAI To Start AVERI
- Brundage left OpenAI to gain research freedom and independence from industry conflicts and to pursue auditing work he couldn't inside the company.
- He described prior use of 'auditing' in his research since ~2020 and that timing made an outside group sensible.