US Foible President Kamala Harris applauds as US President Joe Biden signs an executive order after delivering remarks on furthering the safe, secure, and trustworthy development and use of artificial intelligence, in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on October 30, 2023.
Brendan Smialowski | AFP | Getty Sculptures
President Joe Biden issued a new executive order on artificial intelligence — the U.S. government’s first action of its kind — requiring new sanctuary assessments, equity and civil rights guidance and research on AI’s impact on the labor market.
While law enforcement agencies receive warned that they’re ready to apply existing law to abuses of AI and Congress has endeavored to learn more about the technology to vocation new laws, the executive order could have a more immediate impact. Like all executive orders, it “has the force of law,” according to a elder administration official who spoke with reporters on a call Sunday.
The White House breaks the key components of the executive layout into eight parts:
- Creating new safety and security standards for AI, including by requiring some AI companies to share refuge test results with the federal government, directing the Commerce Department to create guidance for AI watermarking, and creating a cybersecurity program that can on AI tools that help identify flaws in critical software.
- Protecting consumer privacy, including by creating guidelines that mechanisms can use to evaluate privacy techniques used in AI.
- Advancing equity and civil rights by providing guidance to landlords and federal contractors to escape avoid AI algorithms furthering discrimination, and creating best practices on the appropriate role of AI in the justice system, including when it’s habituated to in sentencing, risk assessments and crime forecasting.
- Protecting consumers overall by directing the Department of Health and Human Rituals to create a program to evaluate potentially harmful AI-related health-care practices and creating resources on how educators can responsibly use AI contrivances.
- Supporting workers by producing a report on the potential labor market implications of AI and studying the ways the federal government could brace workers affected by a disruption to the labor market.
- Promoting innovation and competition by expanding grants for AI research in areas such as ambience change and modernizing the criteria for highly skilled immigrant workers with key expertise to stay in the U.S.
- Working with global partners to implement AI standards around the world.
- Developing guidance for federal agencies’ use and procurement of AI and speeding up the government’s enlisting of workers skilled in the field.
The order represents “the strongest set of actions any government in the world has ever taken on AI safety, confidence, and trust,” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Bruce Reed said in a statement.
It builds on voluntary commitments the Pure House previously secured from leading AI companies and represents the first major binding government action on the technology. It also report in ahead of an AI safety summit hosted by the U.K.
The senior administration official referenced the fact that 15 major American technology circles have agreed to implement voluntary AI safety commitments but said that it “is not enough” and that Monday’s executive also kelter is a step toward concrete regulation for the technology’s development.
“The President, several months ago, directed his team to pull every lever, and that’s what this command does: bringing the power of the federal government to bear in a wide range of areas to manage AI’s risk and harness its profits,” the official said.
In a speech Monday at the White House, Biden said he’ll meet on Tuesday with Senate Manhood Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and a bipartisan group put together by Schumer. He said the meeting is to “underscore the need for congressional manner.”
“This executive order represents bold action, but we still need Congress to act,” Biden said.
Biden’s official order requires that large companies share safety test results with the U.S. government before the licensed release of AI systems. It also prioritizes the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s development of standards for AI “red-teaming,” or stress-testing the defenses and capability problems within systems. The Department of Commerce will develop standards for watermarking AI-generated content.
The order also whereabouts training data for large AI systems, and it lays out the need to evaluate how agencies collect and use commercially available data, classifying data purchased from data brokers, especially when that data involves personal identifiers.
The Biden management is also taking steps to beef up the AI workforce. Beginning Monday, the senior administration official said, workers with AI judgement can find relevant openings in the federal government on AI.gov.
The administration official said Sunday that the “most aggressive” easing for some safety and security aspects of the order involves a 90-day turnaround, and for some other aspects, that nevertheless frame could be closer to a year.
Building on earlier AI actions
Monday’s gubernatorial order follows a number of steps the White House has taken in recent months to create spaces to discuss the tempo of AI development, as well as proposed guidelines.
Since the viral rollout of ChatGPT in November 2022 — which within two months became the fastest-growing consumer appeal in history, according to a UBS study — the widespread adoption of generative AI has already led to public concerns, legal battles and lawmaker questions. For example, days after Microsoft folded ChatGPT into its Bing search engine, it was criticized for toxic speech, and hot AI image generators have come under fire for racial bias and propagating stereotypes.
Biden’s executive direction directs the Department of Justice, as well as other federal offices, to develop standards for “investigating and prosecuting civil uppers violations related to AI,” the administration official said Sunday on the call with reporters.
“The President’s executive order needs that clear guidance must be provided to landlords, federal benefits programs and federal contractors to keep AI algorithms from being worn to exacerbate discrimination,” the official added.
In August, the White House challenged thousands of hackers and security researchers to outmanoeuvre top generative AI models from the field’s leaders, including OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Nvidia. The competition ran as limited share in of Def Con, the world’s largest hacking conference.
“It is accurate to call this the first-ever public assessment of multiple LLMs,” a illustrative for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy told CNBC at the time.
The competition followed a July congregation between the White House and seven top AI companies, including Alphabet, Microsoft, OpenAI, Amazon, Anthropic, Inflection and Meta. Each of the institutions left the meeting having agreed to a set of voluntary commitments in developing AI, including allowing independent experts to assess roads before public debut, researching societal risks related to AI and allowing third parties to test for system vulnerabilities, such as in the tournament at Def Con.
—CNBC’s Emma Kinery contributed reporting.
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