ARI urges Congress to strengthen AI provisions
Americans for Responsible Innovation today called on lawmakers to strengthen the artificial intelligence provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) in response to the newly-released House version of the bill. As bipartisan consensus grows around the need for the federal government to adopt safeguards and modernize in the AI era, ARI cautioned that the current draft does not yet meet the scale of the technological transformation reshaping modern warfare and national security.
“This draft of the NDAA includes some positive steps, but doesn’t go far enough to push the Pentagon to allocate the talent, resources, and processes necessary to supercharge adoption of AI where it can be beneficial,” said ARI Executive Director Eric Gastfriend. “Additionally, the initial bill should include more to put safeguards in place to ensure that AI systems deployed for military use are safe, reliable, trustworthy, interpretable, and secure. Ultimately, we want the Department of War to be ambitious in its adoption of AI, but we also need Congress to set the rules of the road so that military use of AI is aligned with American values, especially for high-risk use cases like lethal autonomous weapons.”
The current bill takes important initial steps to build a more AI-literate workforce, accelerate the deployment of AI models, and begin updating Department of War policies governing autonomous weapons systems and AI enabled systems. But in the face of a transformative and rapidly evolving technology, the latest draft of the NDAA fails to adopt strong policies for attracting AI talent, needed updates for AI wargaming, and clear standards for how advanced AI systems are tested, evaluated, and deployed. ARI has also called for the bill to implement stronger guardrails and human oversight requirements for autonomous weapons systems.
In a national poll released earlier this year, ARI found overwhelming concerns among American voters about the use of AI for government surveillance and for autonomous weapons without human oversight. A full 75 percent of Americans agree that decisions about using lethal force in war should involve meaningful human judgment rather than being left entirely to AI systems.
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Americans for Responsible Innovation (ARI) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to policy advocacy in the public interest, focused on emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI). Learn more at ARI.us.