Welcome to the September edition of Akin Intelligence. As the U.S. Congress reconvenes after the August recess, we continue to see bipartisan interest in artificial intelligence (AI) regulation. In the executive branch, President Biden has issued an Executive Order (EO) regarding outbound investment in AI and other critical technologies. Meanwhile, rules and rulings related to AI continue to percolate in U.S. state legislatures, governors' offices and in the U.S. court system. To ensure continued receipt, please subscribe to future issues here if you have not already done so.
Akin Spotlight
Fall Congressional Outlook
Congress returns from the August recess with a robust agenda and limited time to pursue it. The calendar is further constrained by the September 30 deadline to pass appropriations packages or a continuing resolution (CR) to avoid a shutdown of the federal government.
Federal Action
On September 12, 2023, the White House announced the Administration secured voluntary commitments from eight additional AI companies—Adobe, Cohere, IBM, Nvidia, Palantir, Salesforce, Scale AI, and Stability—mirroring those made byAmazon,Anthropic,Google,Inflection,Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI in July. The voluntary commitments include ensuring internal and external testing before product release, investing in cybersecurity and insider threat safeguards, labeling AI-generated content using watermarking or other technology, and sharing information about risks and vulnerabilities.
Concurrently, the Biden Administration is developing an executive order (EO) and will pursue bipartisan legislation to help the U.S. lead in AI innovation.
President Biden Signs Executive Order on Outbound Investment
On August 9, 2023, President Biden released a long-awaited EO establishing an outbound investment screening mechanism that would impose notification requirements and prohibit U.S. persons from engaging in certain transactions involving "countries of concern." The EO tasks the U.S. Department of the Treasury ("Treasury"), in consultation with other federal agencies, to issue regulations that would identify prohibited transactions in key technology industries—semiconductors, quantum computers and AI—that "pose a particularly acute national security threat because of their potential to significantly advance the military, intelligence, surveillance, or cyber-enabled capabilities of countries of concern." Akin's assessment of the EO is available here.
CFPB Unveils Plans for Data Broker Rulemaking; White House Convenes Roundtable
Alongside a White House roundtable on August 16, 2023, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Director Rohit Chopra unveiled the agency's plans to propose rules requiring data brokers and other companies in the surveillance industry to be covered by the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA). The agency plans to first seek feedback from a group of small businesses before issuing a formal rulemaking. In particular, the proposal would address use of such data to train AI, including the development of generative AI chatbots, among other things. According to a White House readout, a number of privacy and civil rights groups also participated in the meeting, including the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), Public Citizen, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and the Leadership Conference.
White House Launches AI Cyber Challenge
The White House on August 9, 2023, launched its "AI Cyber Challenge"—a two-year competition led by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that aims to incentivize competitors to "identify and fix software vulnerabilities using AI." The White House has highlighted its collaboration with Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI to launch the challenge, which includes almost $20 million in prizes.
DoD Unveils Generative AI/LLM Task Force
On August 10, 2023, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) announced a new Generative Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Models (LLM) Task Force. The new group—Task Force Lima—will be led by the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer. In her memorandum, Deputy Secretary of Defense Dr. Kathleen Hicks explained that Task Force Lima will "develop, evaluate, recommend, and monitor the implementation of generative AI technologies across DoD to ensure the Department is able to design, deploy, and use generative AI technologies responsibly and securely." Information received by the task force will be sent to the Responsible AI Working Council, where the Office of the Secretary of Defense and DoD will incorporate the findings in their initiatives and policy developments.
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