The lawmakers’ letter additionally claims that NIST is being rushed to outline requirements despite the fact that analysis into testing AI programs is at an early stage. As a consequence there’s “significant disagreement” amongst AI consultants over work on and even measure and outline questions of safety with the know-how, it states. “The current state of the AI safety research field creates challenges for NIST as it navigates its leadership role on the issue,” the letter claims.

NIST spokesperson Jennifer Huergo confirmed that the company had obtained the letter and mentioned that it “will respond through the appropriate channels.”

NIST is making some strikes that might enhance transparency, together with issuing a request for information on December 19, soliciting enter from outdoors consultants and corporations on requirements for evaluating and red-teaming AI fashions. It is unclear if this was a response to the letter despatched by the members of Congress.

The issues raised by lawmakers are shared by some AI consultants who’ve spent years creating methods to probe AI programs. “As a nonpartisan scientific body, NIST is the best hope to cut through the hype and speculation around AI risk,” says Rumman Chowdhury, an information scientist and CEO of Parity Consulting who makes a speciality of testing AI models for bias and other problems. “But in order to do their job well, they need more than mandates and well wishes.”

Yacine Jernite, machine studying and society lead at Hugging Face, an organization that helps open supply AI tasks, says large tech has much more sources than the company given a key function in implementing the White House’s formidable AI plan. “NIST has done amazing work on helping manage the risks of AI, but the pressure to come up with immediate solutions for long-term problems makes their mission extremely difficult,” Jernite says. “They have significantly fewer resources than the companies developing the most visible AI systems.”

Margaret Mitchell, chief ethics scientist at Hugging Face, says the growing secrecy around commercial AI models makes measurement more challenging for an organization like NIST. “We can’t improve what we can’t measure,” she says.

The White House government order requires NIST to carry out a number of duties, together with establishing a brand new Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute to help the event of secure AI. In April, a UK taskforce centered on AI security was announced. It will obtain $126 million in seed funding.

The executive order gave NIST an aggressive deadline for coming up with, among other things, guidelines for evaluating AI models, principles for “red-teaming” (adversarially testing) models, developing a plan to get US-allied nations to agree to NIST standards, and coming up with a plan for “advancing responsible global technical standards for AI development.”

Although it isn’t clear how NIST is engaging with big tech companies, discussions on NIST’s risk management framework, which took place prior to the announcement of the executive order, involved Microsoft; Anthropic, a startup formed by ex-OpenAI employees that is building cutting-edge AI models; Partnership on AI, which represents big tech companies; and the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to existential risk, among others.

“As a quantitative social scientist, I’m both loving and hating that people realize that the power is in measurement,” Chowdhury says.