Nairobi, July 24 -- Giant artificial intelligence (AI) firms such as OpenAI and Meta face new minimum pay and mental healthcare rules in Kenya as the government seeks better working conditions for local staff, including content moderators and data annotators.

A proposed policy by the ICT Ministry says the government is developing protection guidelines for moderators, who review and remove harmful material from online platforms, and annotators, who label images, text and audio to train AI models such as ChatGPT to recognise and respond to human prompts.

The guidelines will require AI companies and outsourcing firms to comply with locally set duty-of-care standards, including safeguards against harmful content, access to mental health sup...