This morning, the White House issued a much-anticipated executive order on AI to “seiz[e] the promise and manag[e] the risks” of AI.

The Fact Sheet on the White House’s executive order on AI is here. It’s designed to establish “new standards for AI safety and security, protects Americans’ privacy, advances equity and civil rights, stands up for consumers and workers, promotes innovation and competition, advances American leadership around the world, and more.”

It’s also designed to build on “previous actions the President has taken, including work that led to voluntary commitments from 15 leading companies to drive safe, secure, and trustworthy development of AI.” Those companies include: Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection AI, Microsoft, OpenAI, Adobe, IBM, Palantir, Nvidia and Salesforce.

This Executive Order on AI is designed to direct several actions, including:

• New Standards for AI Safety and Security
• Protecting Americans’ Privacy
• Advancing Equity and Civil Rights
• Standing Up for Consumers, Patients, and Students
• Supporting Workers
• Promoting Innovation and Competition
• Advancing American Leadership Abroad
• Ensuring Responsible and Effective Government Use of AI

From a new standards perspective, it includes mechanisms such as requiring that developers of the most powerful AI systems share their safety test results and other critical information with the U.S. government and developing standards, tools, and tests to help ensure that AI systems are safe, secure, and trustworthy (which the White House claims “are the most significant actions ever taken by any government to advance the field of AI safety”). It also includes protecting Americans from AI-enabled fraud and deception by establishing standards and best practices for detecting AI-generated content and authenticating official content.

This follows up previous publications from the White House, including the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights and an Executive Order directing agencies to combat algorithmic discrimination.

As always, the proof is in the pudding, but the White House has certainly been active on AI initiatives this year. BTW, there is something unusual about the Fact Sheet currently, which will presumably be true at least through tomorrow. See if you can spot it. 😉

Hat tip (again) to Nick Wittenberg, who gave me the heads up this was coming a few days ago and promptly sent it to me when it did. 🙂

So, what do you think? What do you think of the new Executive Order on AI? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

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