Can different national regulatory systems recognize common evaluations, audits, and safety standards?
Mutual recognition of evals and audits is the trade-friction question: without it, compliance fragments by jurisdiction; with it, the strictest regime quietly sets the global floor (or the loosest one erodes it).
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Mutual recognition now has an institution-building effort behind it: Brundage's AVERI aims to make third-party frontier audits rigorous and universal enough for jurisdictions to recognize each other's assurance — against the warning that marketplace auditing recreates credit-rating-agency incentives and could institutionalize a false floor. China entered the standards contest too, proposing agent-interoperability and mutual-trust standards at WAIC.
AVERI is a 501(c)(3), US-based non-profit think tank that is trying to figure out how to make third-party auditing of frontier AI effective and universal.
Announces the institution-building effort at the center of the mutual-recognition question: making third-party frontier audits rigorous and universal enough that jurisdictions could actually recognize each other's assurance.
Such insulation is fanciful. Vaccines, for example, are safe, but the facts have not protected them from politics.
The skeptical case against the audit ecosystem interoperability would rest on: marketplace-based auditing recreates credit-rating-agency incentives, so mutually recognized audits could institutionalize a false floor.
We hope to build broad consensus and work with global partners to foster an open, trustworthy, safe, and inclusive agent ecosystem.
China's first systematic position on agent interoperability — a bid to set the trust and interconnection standards for AI agents internationally, extending the interoperability contest from evals and audits to agent infrastructure itself.
Define mutual recognition: Establish processes for governments to recognize each other's certification, audit requirements, and evaluation regimes.
Puts mutual recognition of certifications, audits, and evaluation regimes explicitly on the 2026 agenda, arguing coordination can make divergent national approaches complementary rather than fragmenting.