Meta监督委员会的成员们——这是科技行业中运行时间最长的独立监督实验——给打算成立自己独立安全委员会的AI公司一些建议：赋予董事会真正的权力，否则它们将毫无意义。
Members of Meta’s Oversight Board, the longest-running experiment of independent oversight in the tech industry, have some advice for AI companies looking to launch their own independent safety committees — give boards real power, or they will not mean much.
该委员会已花费六年时间对公司的内容审核决策做出裁决。成员们在采访中表示，包括谷歌、Anthropic、OpenAI、Meta、XAI和英伟达在内的AI公司上周承诺创建的独立安全委员会，除非获得明确授权、真正的独立性和反驳权，否则可能沦为单纯的门面装饰。
The board has spent six years ruling on the company’s content moderation decisions. Members said in interviews that the independent safety committees that AI companies, including Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, XAI and Nvidia, pledged to create last week could become little more than window dressing unless they’re given a clear mandate, real independence and the ability to push back.
“如果要进行真正的监督，公司与该机构之间必然会产生摩擦，”监督委员会成员、圣母大学法学与政治学教授Paolo Carozza在谈到委员会对AI公司监督的建议时表示。“如果不存在这种摩擦，那就肯定意味着没有进行有效的独立监督，”他说。
“If it’s going to be genuine oversight, there’s going to be friction between the company and the body,” Paolo Carozza, a member of the Oversight Board and a professor of law and political science at the University of Notre Dame, said about the board’s recommendations for AI company oversight. “If that friction doesn’t exist, it’s a sure sign that there’s no effective independent oversight going on,” he said.
监督委员会是一个在法律上独立于Meta的实体，对公司的某些社交媒体问题拥有最终决定权，并就其他众多主题提供无约束力的建议。该委员会发布了一封公开信，回应新的自愿性《白宫超级智能协议》，分享其对新AI治理工作的建议。
The Oversight Board, an entity legally independent from Meta that has final say on certain social media issues at the company and offers nonbinding advice on a plethora of other topics, issued an open letter in response to the new voluntary White House Accord on Super Intelligence to share its recommendations for the new AI governance endeavors.
“对于一个像AI这样既拥有巨大潜力又伴随巨大风险的工具，我们将需要一种分层的治理方法，其中包括公司政策、行业采纳的标准、从多个角度对这些标准进行的独立监督，以及监管和国际协调，”该小组在最近的声明中写道。
“With a tool that has as much potential and as much risk as AI, we will need a layered approach to governance that includes company policies, industry-adopted standards, independent oversight of those standards from a range of perspectives as well as both regulation and international coordination,” the group wrote in the recent statement.
该小组成员表示，他们希望任何新委员会都能切实解决对AI的担忧，但他们也对日益强大的AI公司会放弃实现实际变革所必需的控制权表示怀疑。
Members of the group said they hoped that any new committees would meaningfully address concerns about AI, but they also expressed skepticism that increasingly powerful AI companies would give up the control necessary to bring about actual change.
“我认为一家AI公司应该准备好接受审查，即使这会让他们感到不适，因为正是在这种不适中，公司才能赢得公众更多的信任，”监督委员会成员、国际数字权利非营利组织“无国界互联网”（Internet Sans Frontières）的执行主任朱莉·奥沃诺（Julie Owono）表示。监督委员会在最近的一封信中提出了六项建议，说明独立实体应如何对AI公司实施控制，包括设立明确的任务授权、确保组织结构的稳定与独立、引入跨行业专家，并注重透明度。
“I think an AI company should be ready to open itself to scrutiny, even when it’s uncomfortable for them, because it is precisely in that discomfort that the company will gain even more trust from the public,” said Julie Owono, an Oversight Board member and executive director of the international digital rights nonprofit Internet Sans Frontières (Internet Without Borders). The Oversight Board released six recommendations in its recent letter about how independent entities should exert control over AI companies, including through establishing a concrete mandate, ensuring structural stability and independence, involving cross-sector expertise and focusing on transparency.
“透明度至关重要，”奥沃诺说。白宫关于超级智能的协议并不强制OpenAI、Anthropic、谷歌、Meta、英伟达或XAI采取任何特定行动，但该协议明确指出，负责监督AI公司安全工作的独立委员会应由这些公司董事会的成员组成。Meta的监督委员会并不包括Meta的董事会成员，而是由独立专家组成，其中包括记者、人权法律学者，以及一位诺贝尔和平奖得主和一位丹麦前首相。
“Transparency is paramount,” Owono said. The White House Accord on Super Intelligence — which does not bind OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Nvidia or XAI to any particular action — clarifies that the envisioned independent committees overseeing AI companies’ safety efforts should be composed of members from the companies’ boards of directors. Meta’s Oversight Board does not include Meta board members and is instead populated by independent experts, including journalists and human rights legal scholars, as well as a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and a former Danish prime minister.
监督委员会成员、专注于巴基斯坦的数字权利基金会执行主任尼哈特·达德（Nighat Dad）表示，AI公司的独立安全委员会需要能够真正获取可能对公司不利的不公开信息，并且必须拥有财务独立性。“这个委员会是否独立于公司？它是否拥有自己的预算和成员资格？做出这些决定的成员是谁？这些决定是否具有约束力？”达德问道。
Nighat Dad, an Oversight Board member and executive director of the Pakistan-focused Digital Rights Foundation, said independent safety committees at AI companies need to have real access to nonpublic information that might be unflattering for the companies, along with financial independence. “Is the committee separate from the company? Does it control its own budget and its own membership? Who are the members who are making these decisions, and are those decisions binding?”
“如果答案是否定的，那就不是真正的监督。但如果答案是肯定的，它确实能够改变公司的行为方式，”她说。
Dad asked. “If the answer is no, that isn’t oversight. And if the answer is yes, it can genuinely change how companies behave,” she said.
直到2023年，Meta一直在一定程度上控制着监督委员会的部分成员遴选流程，并为该委员会提供了资金——自2019年以来已超过3亿美元，这些资金存放于一个独立信托中。斯坦福大学法律教授伊芙琳·杜埃克（Evelyn Douek）曾对监督委员会进行过研究，她表示，在尝试将独立监督机制纳入AI公司的治理中时，可以从该委员会的经验中学到很多东西。
Meta controlled some of the board’s membership selection process until 2023, and it provided the board with funding — over $300 million since 2019, held in an independent trust. Evelyn Douek, a law professor at Stanford University who has studied the Oversight Board, said efforts to incorporate independent oversight of AI companies have much to learn from the board’s experience.
“我认为，监督委员会更应该成为一个警示案例，而不是一个关于此类情况下独立监督应如何运作的理想模型。”杜埃克说道。她指出，该委员会仅被赋予了有限的权力，只能管理Meta少数决策——具体而言是内容审核相关事务——而无法对Meta更广泛的政策和安全问题拥有具有约束力的决策权。卡罗扎也同意，如果监督委员会的设立方式不同，其成效本可能更高——而正是这种事后反思促使他们在AI公司尚未最终确定自身监督计划之前发声。
“I think the Oversight Board should be more of a cautionary tale rather than a sort of promising model for what independent oversight should look like in these kinds of situations,” Douek said. She pointed out that the board was given only limited powers to govern a small subset of Meta’s decisions — specifically on content moderation — instead of having binding say on Meta’s wider policy and safety issues. Carozza agreed that the board could have been more effective had it been constructed differently — and that such hindsight is what drove it to speak out before AI companies cement their own oversight plans.
“监督委员会的任何人都不认为我们是典范或解决方案。”卡罗扎表示，他反而强调，该委员会拥有六年的经验，可以据此了解哪些方面可以改进。里约热内卢州立大学法律教授、Meta监督委员会成员罗纳尔多·莱莫斯（Ronaldo Lemos）表示，任何能有效确保AI公司遵守安全措施机制，都要求相关方真正与公司任何财务或政治利益实现权力分离。
“Nobody at the Oversight Board is saying we are the model or that we are the solution,” Carozza said, instead highlighting that the board has six years of experience to draw upon to understand what could be improved. Ronaldo Lemos, a law professor at Rio de Janeiro State University and a Meta Oversight Board member, said any effective mechanism for ensuring AI companies comply with safety measures requires those involved to have true separation of power from any of a company’s financial or political incentives.
“OpenAI和Anthropic预计将在未来几个月内登陆公开股票市场，估值均超过一万亿美元。”他说，“监督机制需要独立性，需要透明度，也需要明确的授权。”监督委员会由Meta（当时名为Facebook）于2019年设立，旨在为棘手的言论自由问题提供外部指导。
OpenAI and Anthropic are on track to join public stock exchanges within the next few months, with estimated valuations of over a trillion dollars each. “Oversight needs independence. It needs to be transparent, and it needs to have a clear mandate,” he said. The Oversight Board was established in 2019 by Meta — then called Facebook — to provide external guidance for thorny free speech issues.
监督委员会表示，当时Facebook正因被指控在缅甸罗兴亚人种族灭绝事件中传播虚假新闻和煽动暴力的内容而受到猛烈批评。Facebook联合创始人兼首席执行官马克·扎克伯格当时写道：“该委员会将成为我们社区的倡导者——支持人们自由表达的权利，并确保我们履行保障用户安全的责任。”他还承诺将向监督委员会提供足够的信息和资源，以支持其决策。
At the time, Facebook was being slammed for its alleged role in hosting fake news and content that incited violence that was part of the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, according to the Oversight Board. “The board will be an advocate for our community — supporting people’s right to free expression, and making sure we fulfill our responsibility to keep people safe,” Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote at the time, pledging to give the Oversight Board enough information and resources to make its decisions.
斯坦福大学的杜埃克指出，监督委员会依赖Meta提供资金的特殊结构，可能是其效力有限的原因之一。她说：“归根结底，人们很难以真正有意义的方式去反对那些给予自己支持的人。监督委员会的持续存在，依赖于Meta继续为其提供资金。”一些专家认为，OpenAI是另一家试图通过独立监督委员会来管理安全事务却未能如愿的公司。
Douek of Stanford pointed to the Oversight Board’s unique structure — reliant on Meta for funding — as a potential reason for its limited efficacy. “At the end of the day, it’s very hard for people to bite the hand that feeds them in any meaningful way,” she said. “The Oversight Board’s continuing existence was reliant on Meta continuing to fund it.”Some experts point to OpenAI as another example of a company whose attempts to oversee safety efforts have fallen short, despite its reliance on an independent oversight committee.
由于OpenAI独特的企业结构，其安全与保障委员会有权因安全担忧而暂停或推迟产品发布，但监管该公司的政府机构近期对该委员会的效力表示不满。OpenAI称，该委员会正努力确保公司的系统和产品是安全的。数字权利基金会主任达德也强调，人工智能公司全球性的业务覆盖范围需要全球范围内的协同监管。她指出，即使是在印度和巴基斯坦之间，文化背景也存在差异，并表示：“基于任何单一国家法律或由公司自身制定的标准，永远无法让全球各地的用户感到具有合法性。”达德认为，人工智能公司的监督机构应参考国际人权法，以确保全球规范得到充分考虑。
Because of OpenAI’s unique corporate structure, OpenAI’s Safety and Security Committee has the ability to pause or delay product releases over safety concerns, though the state authorities overseeing the company have recently expressed dissatisfaction with the committee’s efficacy. OpenAI has said the committee works diligently to ensure the company’s systems and products are safe. Dad, the Digital Rights Foundation director, also highlighted that AI companies’ global reach would require concerted global oversight efforts. “A standard based on any one country’s law or written by the company itself will never feel legitimate to users everywhere,” she said, highlighting differences in cultural context even between India and Pakistan. Dad said AI companies’ oversight bodies should turn to international human rights law as a way to ensure global norms are taken into account.
白宫协议中提出的许多监督机制仍然不够清晰。因此，杜埃克表示，现在判断协议中设立的独立监督机构是否具有实际影响力还为时过早。不过她也指出，人工智能公司的规模庞大及其复杂的技术工作，可能会限制监督机构对棘手安全问题了解的程度——监督委员会的成员表示，这一问题在他们最初的委员会中就已显现。
Many of the oversight mechanisms proposed in the White House accord are still unclear. As a result, Douek said, it is too early to tell whether the independent oversight bodies laid out in the accord will carry any weight, though she said the vast sizes of AI companies and their complex technical work could limit oversight groups’ visibility into knotty safety issues — an issue that the Oversight Board members said emerged with their original board.
“一个机构需要具备多少技术能力和资源，才能真正深入探究那些需要监督的问题和议题？”她问道。南加州大学的卡罗扎则强调了人工智能公司未来在经济和社会方面的影响力，并表示：“这些监督机制目前的设计方式，将在两到五年、甚至十年后，对其实际效果以及我们是否需要推翻或重新制定相关安排产生关键影响。因此，从一开始就设计好这些机制至关重要。”
“How much technical capacity and bandwidth does a body have to really dig into the questions and issues that need oversight?” she asked. Emphasizing AI companies’ future economic and social power, Carozza of Notre Dame said: “How these mechanisms of oversight are designed now will have a critical impact two, five, 10 years down the road in terms of how effective they are and whether we need to undo things or redo things. It’s important to get it right from the start.”