The U.S. Senate is to receive briefings in the coming weeks on the state of U.S. artificial intelligence (AI) and how potential U.S. adversaries may use AI.
“This work period, we will convene three bipartisan Senators-only briefings on AI that seek to answer the following questions: Where is AI today? What is the frontier of AI and how do we maintain American leadership? How do the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community use AI today and what do we know about how our adversaries are using AI?” according to a June 6 Dear Colleague letter from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Mike Rounds (R-S.D.)–a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s cybersecurity panel, Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.)–a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Appropriations Committee, and Todd Young (R-Indiana)–a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The three Senate briefings on AI “are the first all-senators briefings on AI,” Schumer said on the Senate floor on June 6. “The briefings will be led by some of the top minds in AI.”
“These all-Senate briefings are important because elected representatives in the 21st century cannot ignore AI any more than we can ignore national security, job creation, or our civil liberties,” he said. “AI will permanently impact all these things and more. The first briefing in the next few weeks will focus on the state of artificial intelligence today. The second briefing will focus on where this technology is headed in the future and how America can stay at the forefront of innovation. The third, our first-ever classified briefing on AI, will focus on how our adversaries will use AI against us, while detailing how defense and intelligence agencies will use this technology to keep Americans safe.”
While AI and machine learning (ML) have become everyday buzzwords, it appears that an understanding of how AI/ML will affect Pentagon systems and operations is unclear among top DoD leaders.
U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown, President Biden’s nominee to become the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Ash Carter Exchange on Innovation and National Security in Washington, D.C., on May 9 that AI and ML are not a cure all for DoD (Defense Daily, May 9).
“I don’t know that we fully understand AI and machine learning,” he said. “I think we’ve made some progress in certain areas as an Air Force just based on our being, in some cases, a more technological service than others, but also based on our relationship with the Space Force. But I think too often, for those of us that work at the Pentagon, you’ll see AI and ML on a bunch of Power Point slides, as if it’s the panacea that’s gonna solve all our problems, and we don’t fully understand it.”
A top official at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) said recently that NGA and DoD are not pausing the development of AI, as the latter needs to improve the fidelity of object identification for combatant commanders (Defense Daily, May 30).
An Apr. 12 open letter by the nonprofit Future of Life Institute, a watchdog group monitoring AI, biotechnologies, nuclear technology, and climate change, called for a pause in the development of AI more powerful than GPT-4.
The letter’s signatories included Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, and Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, Inc. [AAPL].
NGA took over the Pentagon’s Project Maven this year, an effort to use AI on drone imagery for automatic detection and targeting.
Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth, director of NGA, said on May 22 that combatant commanders are routinely using Maven to satisfy their operational needs (Defense Daily, May 22).
Maven may become a program of record this year.