UL Solutions rolls out a new standard to fill a gap in AI regulation: ‘Innovation without safety is failure’

In today’s CEO Daily: UL Solutions CEO Jennifer Scanlon talks to Fortune’s Diane Brady on the company’s new UL 3115 standard

The big leadership story: How to earn $18.4 million without working a single day

The markets: It’s bad out there

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Good morning. For more than 120 years, UL has put its mark on products from tree lights to toaster cords to convey a promise: This won’t kill you. Last week, for the first time, the $3 billion-a-year safety science company issued a new certification for AI-embedded products. As UL Solutions CEO Jennifer Scanlon told me: “Innovation without safety is failure.”

Rarely has there been a technology that’s evolved so fast with so little oversight. (The patchwork of emerging state laws adds to the confusion.) This week, the spotlight is on OpenClaw, the autonomous virtual agent that’s spawned a new craze in China. It got a shout-out from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang during his developers conference this week, where he announced NemoClaw and declared OpenClaw framework to be “the next ChatGPT.”

Can private-sector safety standards do what Washington has not: provide guardrails to fast-moving technologies with potentially profound consequences? The UL mark already goes on about 22 billion products worldwide every year. This latest standard, UL 3115, evaluates whether an AI-enabled product is safe, robust and well-governed with a “human in control” throughout a product’s lifecycle. “Whether or not there’s government regulation around this, our customers are coming to us because they need broader protections and........

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