Washington
CNN
—
President Joe Biden on Thursday ordered his national security agencies to harness new, powerful artificial intelligence technology in a bid to compete with rivals such as China while also applying guardrails to prevent its use for antidemocratic purposes.
The new national security memorandum, issued in the final months of Biden’s term, seeks to strike a balance between deploying AI’s powerful potential with protecting against some of its fearsome possibilities.
For example, the document prohibits use of AI to skirt existing protocols around deploying nuclear weapons. And it bars use of the technology to limit free speech. More generally, it bans agencies from using AI in a ways that “do not align with democratic values.”
Those parameters may seem like obvious rules, but Biden and his team believe setting them out explicitly can help agencies better harness the power of the tools, which they fear could be quickly utilized by global adversaries.
“With a lack of policy clarity and a lack of legal clarity about what can and cannot be done, we are likely to see less experimentation and less adoption than with a clear path for use,” one senior administration official said.
In a series of discussions with his national security team stretching back months, Biden sought to fine-tune the document to ensure its restrictions would be enforced, even at moments of crisis, officials said.
Revealing the new parameters during a speech at the National War College, Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan framed the stakes of managing the rise of AI.
“We have to get this right, because there is probably no other technology that will be more critical to our national security and the years ahead,” Sullivan said.
The president, in the memorandum, also directed agencies to help American firms protect AI technology from foreign spies and to continue making advances on producing semiconductor chips that are necessary for many AI products.
The order sets timelines for agency reviews that expire well after Biden will have left office. It’s not clear how former President Donald Trump would approach the issue if elected. Vice President Kamala Harris has been actively involved in the current administration’s AI efforts, including attending a summit on the topic in London.
Biden administration officials believe rapidly developing AI tools will set off new competition between world powers. While largely developed in the United States, countries like China are swiftly applying the technology in military and civilian settings.
The US has held discussions with Beijing on the topic, but hopes to engage further on the riskiest applications of AI.
“We know that China is building its own technological ecosystem with digital infrastructure that won’t protect sensitive data, that can enable mass surveillance and censorship, that can spread misinformation and that can make countries vulnerable to coercion,” Sullivan said.
“So we have to compete to provide a more attractive path, ideally before countries go too far down an untrusted road from which it can be expensive and difficult to return,” he said.