New AI guidelines for U.S. national-security agencies

The White House has issued a national security memorandum regarding Artificial Intelligence (AI), with the aim of ensuring that national agencies adopt this technology in ways that align with U.S. values. The main concern regarding the deployment of AI tools to high-stakes areas like national security is the propensity of these models to produce false positives and the fact that the data sets that these models are trained on, even though publicly available, can contain personal information on U.S. civilians. The memorandum provides guidelines on how to utilize AI for national security missions, requiring agencies to ‘monitor, assess, and mitigate AI risks related to invasions of privacy, bias and discrimination, the safety of individuals and groups, and other human rights abuses’. This new memo also designates the Commerce Department’s AI Safety Institute as the U.S. industry’s primary port of contact in the U.S. government.