The agency is far from finalizing a rule proposal, the sources stressed. But the fact that such a move is under consideration shows the US government is seeking to close gaps in its effort to thwart Beijing’s AI ambitions, despite serious challenges to imposing a muscular regulatory regime on the fast-evolving technology.
As the Biden administration looks at competition with China and the dangers of sophisticated AI, AI models “are obviously one of the tools, one of the potential choke points that you need to think about here,” said Peter Harrell, a former National Security Council official.
“Whether you can, in fact, practically speaking, turn it into an export-controllable chokepoint remains to be seen,” he added.
Bioweapons, cyber attacks; risk assessment ‘hard’
The American intelligence community, think tanks and academics are increasingly concerned about risks posed by foreign bad actors gaining access to advanced AI capabilities. Researchers at Gryphon Scientific and Rand Corporation noted that advanced AI models can provide information that could help create biological weapons.
The Department of Homeland Security said cyber actors would likely use AI to “develop new tools” to “enable larger-scale, faster, efficient, and more evasive cyber attacks” in its 2024 homeland threat assessment.
“The potential explosion for [AI’s] use and exploitation is radical and we’re having actually a very hard time kind of following that,” Brian Holmes, an official at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said an export control gathering in March, flagging China’s advancement as a particular concern.
To address these concerns, the US has taken measures to stem the flow of American AI chips and the tools to make them to China.
It also proposed a rule to require US cloud companies to tell the government when foreign customers use their services to train powerful AI models that could be used for cyber attacks.
But so far it hasn’t addressed the AI models themselves. Alan Estevez, who oversees US export policy at the Department of Commerce, said in December that the agency was looking at options for regulating open source large language model (LLM) exports before seeking industry feedback.
Tim Fist, an AI policy expert at Washington DC-based think tank CNAS, says the threshold “is a good temporary measure until we develop better methods of measuring the capabilities and risks of new models.”
Tech thresholds on models ‘better’
Jamil Jaffer, a former White House and Justice Department official, said the Biden administration should not use a computing power threshold but opt for a control based on the model’s capabilities and intended use.
“Focusing on the national security risk rather than the technology thresholds is the better play, because it is more lasting and focused on the threat,” he said.
The threshold is not set in stone. One of the sources said Commerce might end up with a lower floor, coupled with other factors, like the type of data or potential uses for the AI model, such as the ability to design proteins that could be used to make a biological weapon.
Regardless of the threshold, AI model exports will be hard to control. Many models are open source, meaning they would remain beyond the purview of export controls under consideration.
Even imposing controls on the more advanced proprietary models will prove challenging, as regulators will likely struggle to define the right criteria to determine which models should be controlled at all, Fist said, noting that China is likely only around two years behind the United States in developing its own AI software.
The export control being considered would impact access to the backend software powering some consumer applications like ChatGPT, but not limit access to the downstream applications themselves.
