Vice President Kamala Harris plans to announce the creation of a United States AI Safety Institute in a speech on Wednesday as part of her visit to the UK for a summit on the safety of the emerging technology.
The Safety Institute, to be part of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, will develop technical guidance for regulators considering action on issues such as authenticating human generated content and watermarking AI content, as well and efforts to stem algorithmic discrimination and to boost privacy standards. The institute also will create benchmarks and best practices for evaluating and mitigating AI risks.
Harris’s speech will be tied to the Global Summit on AI Safety, a two-day event at Bletchley Park that is expected to include world leaders and tech company executives. Among those expected to participate are Elon Musk and Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI, as well as British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
Harris also is expected to announce draft policy guidance on the U..S government’s use of AI, a political declaration on the military use of AI, and a $200 million philanthropic initiative, funded by ten foundations, to ensure that AI is used in the public interest.
The initiatives add to steps the Biden administration has taken recently to try to establish guardrails on the technology. President Joe Biden issued an executive order on AI this week, including requirement by companies share their safety test results with the U.S. government. Biden and Harris secured a set of voluntary commitments from AI companies at a White House meeting last summer. One was a pledge to create watermarking tools to help identify synthetic content.
In her speech, Harris plans to say that “to define AI safety we must consider and address the full spectrum of AI risk — threats to humanity as a whole, threats to individuals, to our communities and to our institutions, and threats to our most vulnerable populations. To make sure AI us safe, we must manage all these dangers.”