As artificial intelligence technology continues to become more mainstream, concerns that it may cause great damage to society have reached the White House.

While leading AI company OpenAI made promises to the White House that it will uphold the highest safety standards in its testing of new versions, members of the safety team revealed that it had condensed its safety testing into a single week in order to meet a May launch date.

Revelations of OpenAI’s decision to speed up testing comes less than a year after President Joe Biden issued an executive order setting security and safety standards for the budding technology. 

“President Biden has been clear with tech companies about the importance of ensuring that their products are safe, secure, and trustworthy before releasing them to the public,” Robyn Patterson, a spokeswoman for the White House, told the Washington Post. “Leading companies have made voluntary commitments related to independent safety testing and public transparency, which he expects they will meet.”

However, it is now only up to the companies to ensure that these standards are actually met.

The rollout of GPT-40, which required the use of human evaluators, was compressed into testing into a single week, prompting criticism from workers. 

One representative of OpenAI’s preparedness team told the newspaper that the timing of the tests has been “squeezed” to ensure that it would be able to meet its launch date.

We “are rethinking our whole way of doing it,” the representative said. “This [was] just not the best way to do it.”

In a statement, OpenAI spokeswoman Lindsey Held said the company “didn’t cut corners on our safety process, though we recognize the launch was stressful for our teams.” Held even said the company held back on some multimedia features “initially to continue our safety work.”

However some employees wrote a letter to the company requesting that they not be included in confidentiality agreements so they could warn the public and lawmakers about safety risks. 

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Following the launch of the GPT-40 launch, former OpenAI executive Jan Leike resigned, writing on X  that “over the past years, safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products.”

Just weeks before the launch date, OpenAI began its “dry runs.” OpenAI’s Safety Advisory Group was told it would have just a limited time to analyze the results of the safety tests.