Over the past year, dramatic advances in generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its rapid availability in products and services have catapulted AI into the public’s imagination with images and predictions that are both enormously promising and deeply concerning. To respond to these trends, the United States has sought to address AI technologies holistically by focusing on the potential of AI to boost economic prosperity, help overcome major societal challenges, and close the digital divide. It also recognizes that trustworthy AI requires strong governance tools that engage all relevant stakeholders to create a safe, secure and productive AI ecosystem.
As a starting point, in 2022, the White House published a Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights to help counter harms that AI can perpetuate, including discrimination in hiring processes or credit decisions and violations of individual privacy. The Blueprint identified five principles to guide the use and development of AI, in large part inspired by the OECD AI Principles that the United States has endorsed. In January 2023, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) also released its AI Risk Management Framework (AI RMF).
More recently, on October 30th, President Biden issued a landmark Executive Order (E.O.) 14110 on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence to ensure that the United States leads the way in seizing the benefits and managing the risks of AI. The E.O. aims to establish new standards for AI safety and security, protect Americans’ privacy, advance equity and civil rights, stand up for consumers and workers, promote innovation and competition, and advance American leadership around the world. Importantly, the E.O. also builds on previous White House work to establish voluntary commitments from 15 leading U.S. companies to drive safe, secure, and trustworthy development of AI.
The E.O. emphasizes the Department of Commerce’s leading role in the U.S. Government’s approach to safe, secure, and trustworthy AI and promoting AI innovation.
Commerce will play a major role in several lines of work under the auspices of this E.O.:
• Guidance and Testing - NIST will develop guidance on red-teaming, safety, and cybersecurity and provide testing environments to evaluate AI models against these guidelines.
• Transparency with Frontier Models - Commerce will require industry to share information on their development of frontier models with the U.S. Government, including disclosure of information on frontier AI computing resources and frontier AI development by foreign companies on U.S. cloud.
• AI and Intellectual Property - Commerce will clarify how the use of AI in the inventive process impacts patent inventorship and calls for recommendations on potential executive actions as to copyright and AI;
• AI Model Weights - Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) will solicit public input and issue a report relating to the benefits and risks of widely available model weights (such as open-source AI models); and
• International Engagement - Commerce will work in collaboration with the Department of State to expand bilateral, multilateral, and multistakeholder collaborative AI engagements, prioritizing work with likeminded nations to harmonize policies on AI, accelerate the development of vital AI standards, and promote the safe, responsible, and rights-affirming development and deployment of AI abroad to solve global challenges.
19 дек 2023
