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The White House has published a memo urging US intelligence agencies to harness the power of artificial intelligence while managing its risks.
The memo is the federal government’s first to address national security specifically in relation to AI. It follows President Joe Biden’s Executive Order on AI in 2023.
The memo focuses on three areas: ensuring the US is a world leader on the development of safe, secure and trustworthy AI; using cutting-edge AI to advance US national security interests; and building an international consensus on AI governance.
“AI has emerged as an era-defining technology and has demonstrated significant and growing relevance to national security,” the memo says. “AI, if used appropriately and for its intended purpose, can offer great benefits.
“If misused, AI could threaten United States national security, bolster authoritarianism worldwide, undermine democratic institutions and processes, facilitate human rights abuses, and weaken the rules-based international order.”
Read more: OECD launches G7 toolkit for ‘safe, secure and trustworthy’ AI in the public sector
What next?
The memo outlines a raft of actions for agencies to accelerate AI development.
These include a call for the National Science Foundation to use the National AI Research Resource to “distribute computational resources, data and other critical assets for AI development” to universities, nonprofits, and independent researchers, who may not otherwise have access to them.
It also instructs the Department for Education to “launch a pilot project to evaluate the performance and efficiency of federated AI and data sources for frontier AI-scale training, fine-tuning, and inference”.
In the interest of protecting US-based AI systems from hostile threats abroad, the memo says it is essential that the federal government must “secure the foundational capabilities across the United States that power AI development” and “provide appropriate government assistance to relevant non-government entities”.
To aid this, members of the intelligence community including the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Departments of Defense, Justice, Commerce, Education, and Homeland Security, are urged to “identify critical nodes in the AI supply chain and develop a list of the most plausible avenues through which these nodes could be disrupted or compromised by foreign actors”.
The memo also warns that foreign actors are a risk to US intellectual property through what it calls “grey-zone methods”, such as “technology transfer and data localisation requirements”.
“AI-related intellectual property often includes critical technical artifacts (CTAs) that would substantially lower the costs of recreating, attaining or using powerful AI capabilities,” the memo states. “The United States Government must guard against these risks.”
Read more: France appoints first AI minister
Foundations laid
Earlier this year, the US federal cybersecurity agency appointed its first chief AI officer, Lisa Einstein, to demonstrate its “commitment to responsibly use AI to advance its cyber defence mission”.
Einstein had previously served as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s senior adviser, and as executive director of its Cybersecurity Advisory Committee. She was responsible for producing and implementing an AI Roadmap that promoted the use of AI in cybersecurity work.
Earlier this month, the Office of Management and Budget released new procurement guidelines for agencies to improve risk management around the purchase of AI systems and machine learning software.
These include recommendations for agencies to weigh the risk any acquisition poses to “privacy, security [and] data ownership and rights”.
In September, the first global AI treaty was signed by national governments, including the US, UK and EU member states, with a focus on protecting and integrating human rights into existing and new AI technologies.
While hailed as the world’s first legally binding global AI treaty, the AI Convention was also criticised by activists for placing exemptions on AI used in the interest of national security.
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