The US and Britain along with another dozen countries inked a detailed international agreement on how to keep rogue actors at bay from artificial intelligence and encouraged companies to develop AI systems that are ‘secure by design’.

Companies designing and using AI need to develop and deploy that safeguards customers and the wider public.

The agreement is said to be non-binding, carrying mostly general recommendations such as monitoring AI systems for abuse, protecting data from tampering and vetting software suppliers.

The director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Jen Easterly, said that it was important that so many countries put their names to the idea that AI systems needed to put safety first.

The agreement comes amid a series of initiatives with a few from governments around the world stating to shape the development of AI that is having a heavy presence on industries and societies at large.

Aside from the US and Britain, Germany, Italy, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Poland, Australia, Chile, Israel, Nigeria and Singapore are among the 18 countries that signed the agreement on the new guidelines.

The framework comprises questions around how to keep AI technology away from the hands of hackers and recommends releasing models after appropriate security testing.

It does not dwell upon questions against the appropriate uses of AI or how the data that feeds these models are collected.

The emergence of AI has evoked many concerns with the fear of using it to disrupt the democratic process, turbocharge fraud, or lead to dramatic job loss, among other harms.

Europe is believed to be ahead of the US over regulations around AI with its lawmakers drafting on AI rules. France, Germany and Italy also recently reached an agreement on how AI should be regulated to support ‘mandatory self-regulation through codes of conduct’ for foundation models of AI that are designed to produce a broad range of output.