Technology

You are either naive or new to this planet. If you tell industry that this or that thing is voluntary, it will definitely not happen. There must be thousands of examples out there. "Voluntary" regulation never worked on this planet.

If you want industry to do something, there is the stupid way of bribing them into it, and the smart way of simply forcing them to comply. If you do the latter, they will still squirm, complain, and demand money (loads of money!) to follow the law. If you forgot to define fines for non-compliance or made them too small, they won't follow the law, either, of course, so the fines have to be painful enough so they can't just file them away as "costs of doing business".

If you think 'voluntary' is acceptable for anything important you want corporations to do, you have no business making decisions about real life. If it's voluntary, they'll only do it if it benefits them.

Corporations must be forced to do the right thing, they literally exist to exploit and destroy and privatize profits thru socializing losses and externalities

Lol. "Voluntary Transparency" isn't that against current USA standards cuse it has "Trans" in it?

If you mandate reporting the accountants will design a reporting scheme that makes the default company behaviour appear environmentally friendly

Something something goodhart's law

It's a loaded question, if the transparency reports are enough they'll likely cover whatever the law requires.

The real question is basically should companies report environmental impact for AI training; I'm on the fence for this. It sounds good on paper, but will it cause investment overseas and is it the most useful place to burden companies?