Introduction:

There is a need for untrusting parties to share information. In the world before LLMs (and even today) this need has largely been satisfied using legal contracts (and sometimes through cryptography and blockchain technologies). However the scale and pace of things to keep track of and monitor has grown immensely and legal contracts appear insufficient.

LLMs can help give auditors the right tools to enable information sharing with untrusted parties. In this post, I outline the shape of the problems that need to be resolved to enable using LLMs for 3rd party auditing, and present one concrete solution we have attempted. We designed a scheme for third party auditing: an open-source LLM, running inside a trusted execution environment (TEE), which executes commands that the two parties have agreed on over private data.

In this post, I highlight that this type of tooling can directly be applied to enabling 3rd party monitoring for regular governance concerns, it has applications to enabling improved monitoring for customers who want Zero-Data-Retention, and it also can be one of the tools that enable a verified slowdown.