Pentagon, intelligence, and White House officials’ classified, artificial intelligence (AI) briefing to about 70 senators on July 11th was a “candid, wake up call,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on July 12.
The presentation was the second of three planned AI briefings to senators.
Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks; Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines; Vice Adm. Frank “Trey” Whitworth, the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency; White House Office of Science Technology and Policy Director Arati Prabhakar; and DoD Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer Craig Martell gave senators insights on the national security implications of AI and answered questions, Schumer said.
The briefing “was a candid, wake up call on how truly complicated AI is and how much work–hard work–we have before us ,” Schumer said in a July 12 Senate floor speech. “We want to move quickly, but not too quickly. We need to move quickly so bad countries–authoritarian countries–and bad actors do not get ahead of us, but we can’t move too quickly because we have to get this right, and it’s very complicated.”
Congressional action to regulate AI and promote AI innovation “will not be a matter of weeks nor of years, but rather of months,” he said.
Last month, Schumer laid out a SAFE (Security, Accountability, protecting our Foundations, and Explainability) Innovation Framework for AI.
“We have to address some of the risks of this technology,” Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) told reporters before the July 11 briefing. “There are a lot of pitfalls here where bias and bad data can really impact people’s lives.”
Heinrich formed the Senate AI Caucus in 2019 with former Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio).
The Pentagon is pursuing AI development in a number of areas.
The Air Force, for example, is mulling a Fight Tonight Vanguard program to demonstrate AI-based theater-level, adaptive planning against technologically advanced adversaries.
In fiscal 2024, the Air Force requests nearly $50 million for the Viper Experimentation and Next-gen Operations Mode (VENOM).
Under VENOM, the Air Force is to test six autonomous F-16s with rapidly upgradable software and evaluate the performance of the AI-enabled autonomy (Defense Daily, March 27).