Big Tech's AI auditors may only see what they're shown
A CoinDesk op-ed argues the audits promised under the White House AI accord won't mean much unless auditors, not the companies, decide what gets tested.
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Key takeaways
- Samuel Vance-Law, head of research at the Decentralization Research Center, wrote the CoinDesk opinion piece.
- His core argument: auditors should choose what they test, not the companies being audited.
- The piece is aimed at the audits tied to the White House accord on AI.
- The source material gives no details on the accord's terms, so specifics remain unconfirmed.
Start with a basic rule: an audit can only be as good as what the auditor is allowed to examine. That's the case Samuel Vance-Law, head of research at the Decentralization Research Center, makes in a CoinDesk opinion piece published October 16.
The argument
Vance-Law is writing about the audits tied to the White House accord on AI. For those audits to be worth anything, he argues, the auditors have to choose what gets tested. Let the companies under review set the scope, and the auditors see only what they're shown.
The claim is simple. It's also the crux of any independent review.
What we don't know
All we have is a short summary of the piece. It doesn't spell out the accord's terms, which companies are covered, or how audit scope is set today. I'm not going to guess at those. For the specifics, read the full op-ed and the accord text.
Why it matters
Crypto readers have seen this movie. Exchange proof-of-reserves reports were often limited to whatever the exchange chose to disclose, and several of those reassurances aged badly. The lesson carries over: a clean audit of a narrow scope tells you little about the whole system.
And this goes beyond politics. AI models are increasingly built into trading tools, wallets and agents that handle real funds. If the auditing regime for the big AI providers is weak, users downstream inherit the blind spot. So who decides the scope? That's the question to put to any audit, whether it's AI or crypto.
Source: CoinDesk
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Daniel Okoro
Daniel tracks crypto regulation and policy across the US, EU and Asia, with a decade in financial journalism.
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