SeedAI Joins Letter Supporting Authorizing the AISI

Perspective

By Josh New

October 22, 2024

Washington, D.C.

SeedAI joined 64 leading organizations in industry and civil society to call on House and Senate Leadership to authorize the creation of the AI Safety Institute before the end of the 118th Congress. Authorizing the AISI is a critical first step towards ensuring the federal government can meaningfully understand and respond to AI safety challenges.

Dear Speaker Johnson, Majority Leader Schumer, Minority Leader Jeffries, and Republican

Leader McConnell,

This Congress, the Senate and House have both undertaken important efforts to advance U.S. leadership in artificial intelligence. Thanks to your initiative, Congress is positioned to act this year to foster AI innovation and enhance American competitiveness and national security. We urge you to prioritize enactment of legislation to authorize the activities of the U.S. Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute within the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) before the end of the 118th Congress. This work at NIST is already underway, in close partnership with a cross-section of stakeholders. As other nations around the world are establishing their own AI safety institutes, furthering NIST’s ongoing efforts is essential to advancing U.S. AI innovation, leadership, and national security.

The Senate Commerce Committee and House Science Committee have each advanced bipartisan bills to this effect – S. 4178, Chair Cantwell and Senator Young’s Future of AI Innovation Act and H.R. 9497, the AI Advancement and Reliability Act, led by House AI Task Force Chairs Representatives Obernolte and Lieu. Now the two chambers must come together on final legislation to codify and provide the resources for a NIST U.S. AI Safety Institute focused on research and development and pre-deployment testing and evaluation of the resilience and safety of AI systems.

There is a critical opportunity for the U.S. to lead multilateral efforts through its own AI Safety Institute – or risk letting other countries write the rules for this powerful technology. Codifying this work at NIST before the end of this year will help ensure that the U.S. maintains its influence in the development of science-backed standards and technical work that underpin our shared goal of responsible development of advanced AI systems. Authorizing legislation, and the accompanying necessary resources, will give much needed certainty to NIST’s role in AI safety and reliability.

Thank you for your consideration and we look forward to working with you to advance responsible AI innovation.

Sincerely,

Information Technology Industry Council (ITI)

Americans for Responsible Innovation

A.Capital

Accenture

AI Policy Institute

Amazon

AMD

Anthropic

Autodesk

BSA | The Software Alliance

Canva

Capitol Technical University

Carnegie Mellon University

Center for AI Policy

Center for AI Safety Action Fund

Cisco

CivAI

Clarifai

Cohere

Common Crawl Foundation

Consumer Technology Association (CTA)

Drexel University

EleutherAI

Encode Justice

FAIR Institute

FAR AI

Federation of American Scientists (FAS)

General Dynamics Information Technology

GitHub

GlobalFoundries

Google

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Hugging Face

IBM

Inclusive Abundance Action

Indeed

Institute for Progress

Intel

Internet Works

Intuit

ITIF Center for Data Innovation

Juniper NetworksKeysight Technologies

Leela AI

Lenovo

Lockheed Martin Corporation