We’re building powerful LLMs that might be a major national security risk.
Thanks to the Defense Production Act, OpenAI, Google, and other AI companies will soon have to inform the government about developing foundation models. According to Wired, US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo shared new details about this impending requirement at an event held by Stanford University’s Hoover Institute last Friday.
“We’re using the Defense Production Act… to do a survey requiring companies to share with us every time they train a new large language model, and share the results—the safety data—so we can review it,” said Raimondo.
The new rules are part of President Biden’s sweeping AI executive order announced last October. Amongst the broad set of mandates, the order requires companies developing any foundation model “that poses a serious risk to national security, national economic security, or national public health and safety” to notify the federal government and share the results of its safety testing. Foundation models are models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s Gemini that power generative AI chatbots. However, GPT-4 is likely below the threshold of computing power that requires government oversight.
Future foundation models, ones that have unprecedented computing power, are the main concern because of their massive potential national security risk. That’s why this mandate falls in the territory of the Defense Production Act, which was last invoked in 2021 by President Biden to increase the production of pandemic-related protective equipment and supplies.
At the event, Raimondo also addressed another aspect of the executive order, which would require US cloud computing providers like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft to disclose foreign use of their services.
“We’re beginning the process of requiring US cloud companies to tell us every time a non-US entity uses their cloud to train a large language model,” said Raimondo, per Bloomberg.
The secretary of commerce should have disclosed when these requirements would go into effect. But an announcement is expected very soon since the deadline is today, Jan. 28.
