Biden Administration Outlines Government ‘Guardrails’ for A.I. Tools; The New York Times, October 24, 2024

David E. Sanger, The New York Times ; Biden Administration Outlines Government ‘Guardrails’ for A.I. Tools

"President Biden on Thursday signed the first national security memorandum detailing how the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies and other national security institutions should use and protect artificial intelligence technology, putting “guardrails” on how such tools are employed in decisions varying from nuclear weapons to granting asylum.

The new document is the latest in a series Mr. Biden has issued grappling with the challenges of using A.I. tools to speed up government operations — whether detecting cyberattacks or predicting extreme weather — while limiting the most dystopian possibilities, including the development of autonomous weapons.

But most of the deadlines the order sets for agencies to conduct studies on applying or regulating the tools will go into full effect after Mr. Biden leaves office, leaving open the question of whether the next administration will abide by them...

The new guardrails would also prohibit letting artificial intelligence tools make a decision on granting asylum. And they would forbid tracking someone based on ethnicity or religion, or classifying someone as a “known terrorist” without a human weighing in.

Perhaps the most intriguing part of the order is that it treats private-sector advances in artificial intelligence as national assets that need to be protected from spying or theft by foreign adversaries, much as early nuclear weapons were. The order calls for intelligence agencies to begin protecting work on large language models or the chips used to power their development as national treasures, and to provide private-sector developers with up-to-the-minute intelligence to safeguard their inventions."