The U.S. government wants to use AI too (but ethically)

The Biden administration said Thursday that the U.S. government will ask for public guidance on its own plans to use AI inside government agencies.

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) said that the agency “will be releasing draft policy guidance on the use of AI systems by the U.S. government for public comment.” It comes as administration officials including Vice President Kamala Harris meet with the chief executives of Alphabet, Anthropic, Microsoft, and OpenAI—the four companies at the heart of AI development in the United States.

“AI is one of the most powerful technologies of our time, but in order to seize the opportunities it presents, we must first mitigate its risks,” the administration said in a statement. “President Biden has been clear that when it comes to AI, we must place people and communities at the center by supporting responsible innovation that serves the public good, while protecting our society, security, and economy.”

The OMB’s AI policy will be released this summer, with the idea that the public will have a chance to comment before the government acts. Specifically, government agencies would be able to “responsibly leverage AI to advance their missions and strengthen their ability to equitably serve Americans,” the statement added.

The administration also said that it would work with leading AI developers, including Anthropic, Google, Hugging Face, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and Stability AI, to participate in a public evaluation of their own AI systems, to ensure they were consistent with U.S. policy. The National Science Foundation also announced $140 million in funding to launch seven new National AI Research Institutes. 

The immediate problem is that AI has evolved rapidly, with or without input from either the government or even outside major tech companies like Google. “There’s no putting the AI genie back in the bottle,” said Craig Burland, CISO with Inversion6, a cybersecurity company.

“Clever humans will find new ways to use this tool—for good and bad,” Burland said in an emailed statement. “Any regulation will largely be ceremonial and practically unenforceable.”

The Biden administration earlier on Thursday proposed a 30-percent tax on cryptocurrency.