OpenAI and Google will be required to notify the government about AI models

OpenAI, Google and other AI companies will soon have to notify the government about the development of basic models, thanks to the Defense Production Act. According to WiredU.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo shared new details about this looming requirement at an event last Friday hosted by Stanford University’s Hoover Institute.

“We’re using the Defense Production Act…to conduct an investigation requiring companies to share with us every time they train a new large language model, and to share with us the results (the safety data) so we can examine them,” Raimondo said.

The new rules are part of President Biden’s broad executive order on AI announced last October. Among the broad range 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 to share the results of its security tests. . The core 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 requiring government oversight.

Future Foundation models, with unprecedented computing power, are the main concern due to their enormous potential risk to national security. This is why this mandate falls within the territory of the Defense Production Act, which was last invoked in 2021 by President Biden increase production of pandemic-related protective equipment and supplies.

At the event, Raimondo also addressed another aspect of the executive order that would require U.S. cloud computing providers like Amazon, Google and Microsoft to disclose the use of their services abroad.

“We are starting to require U.S. cloud companies to notify us whenever a non-U.S. entity uses their cloud to train a large language model,” Raimondo said, according to Bloomberg.

The Commerce Secretary did not reveal when these requirements would take effect. But an announcement is expected very soon since the deadline is today, January 28.