Education will be key to good AI regulation: A view from the USA

It is a balmy, perfect April day on the streets of Washington DC, although the air already carries the unmistakable fecund scent of the humid East Coast summer that is coming. Inside a downtown convention centre, Salesforce executives on their World Tour whip up a frenzy of whooping, shouting out attendees who have commuted in from the capital’s vast suburban hinterland in the surrounding states of Maryland and Virginia.

With US federal agencies figuring out how to work with the terms of last year’s Executive Order (EO) on use of artificial intelligence (AI) from the White House, and the upper house of the American legislature, the Senate, expected to soon release a report or whitepaper on AI regulation, talk at this year’s DC edition of the World Tour was dominated by AI – especially on how its use will be controlled and regulated within the government.

On the record, Salesforce is hopeful that progress can be made in Congress before things start winding down over the summer ahead of the contentious November 2024 presidential election – although conversation in the halls of its DC event suggests this may be a forlorn hope.

Hugh Gamble, Salesforce vice-president of federal affairs, reckons Biden’s EO as a good start. Gamble, who started out as a software engineer before going to law school and then spending the best part of a decade steeped in US political culture as counsel to senators from Mississippi and Georgia, describes it as a roadmap, but points out that it’s currently not much more than that.

“The EO was a great first step and it was nice to see the US leading a little bit. But an EO has limitations – it is not legislation, it is dictating what the Executive Branch will do,” he explains.

“It told Executive Branch agencies how to, essentially, approach the problems, looking at it through potential harms, ways that they should analyse products in the future, and making sure they do have the skills and individuals necessary to evaluate those products.

“In addition to their own procurement of products and use of products they have to think about their charge, what their mission is and how those products could potentially be used in their arena.

“What we are in right now is a period where each of these agencies is quickly ramping up as fast as they possibly can and trying to get to a place of competency with looking at their own internal work in the future, but also how they will handle it so far as they are a regulatory agency.”

Ultimately, even though the Executive Branch is a huge consumer of IT and the decisions it takes on procurement and rules regarding safeguards and protections will have a market impact, says Gamble, it will take more than just one EO to move the needle.

“Realistically, we need Congress to act to pass something that is applicable outside of the scope of the Executive Branch,” he says, with the concern being that not to do so is to risk every federal agency and body in the US developing its own approach, which would be unhelpful.

“The government always runs into that problem,” says Gamble. “There’s a programme called FedRAMP and each agency treats it differently and that’s been a bone of contention at times in the public sector. But there’s at least some fundamental understanding and cooperation that you’re working off of similar guidelines.

“I think that’s what you’re we’re hoping for at this point. Each agency has a different mission. And so we understand that they will interpret and apply what’s been told to them in different ways, and that’s the nature of government. What we would hope for is legislation to come out of Congress that will provide for some guardrails into the private sector, so that we can provide some confidence in the technology products that people are using.”

Gamble cannot yet point to any real world examples of what that might look like, simply because the work is ongoing, but he is hopeful that the various bodies involved are eager to collaborate on it.

“What we are seeing is that they are paying attention, they’re communicating, they’re learning from each other. They are using similar terminologies and understanding of the technology. And so when they see something being done in a smart way, they will in some ways, learn from it and either iterate on that or they will incorporate it in totality,” he says.

“But…I really do think that the Senate whitepaper is going to be our first real indication of how Congress is looking at the issue and how they think that they’ll start to tackle the issue there.”

There will clearly be extensive debate following its publication, but ahead of time, Gamble says he is pleased not to have seen any huge disagreements, even though “they’re coming and they’ll come in places we don’t expect them”. For now, everybody on the Hill appears to be working in good faith to get things as far along as possible.

“Once you start drafting a bill, that’s when you start counting – it becomes a math problem at that point and you want to get it right. You’ve got to get to 60 votes in the Senate, you’ve got to get to a majority in the House [of Representatives]. And that’s when political compromises will become part of that conversation,” he says.

For now, Congress has been playing its cards close to its chest in terms of what it might recommend, but according to Gamble, those involved have been “very thoughtful” and talking to the right people. This includes Salesforce, which is keen to be in the room where it happens because its customers will run screaming if it isn’t.

“The part of the tech industry we occupy requires us to have a level of accuracy and fidelity to truth – our customers are not going to put up with 95% accuracy, so we hold ourselves to a higher standard that puts us in a different position than companies out there moving fast and rolling out new products to perfect later on,” he explains.

“We go in and talk about certainty, privacy, a risk-based framework that looks at the utility of AI, and we can feel confident that if they follow those guidelines we’re going to clear the hurdles they put out there to demonstrate we are proficient.”