Pentagon Launches Strategy for Responsible AI Implementation; Kathleen Hicks Quoted

The Department of Defense has released a document providing a roadmap on how DOD will advance the responsible use of artificial intelligence.

The Responsible Artificial Intelligence Strategy and Implementation Pathway lists proposed actions to promote responsible AI use across the department based on six foundational tenets: RAI governance; warfighter trust; AI product and acquisition lifecycle; requirements validation; responsible AI ecosystem; and AI workforce.

The DOD RAI Working Council developed the pathway in accordance with a May 2021 memo issued by Kathleen Hicks, deputy secretary of defense and a 2022 Wash100 Award winner, to advance the implementation of responsible AI within DOD.

“The RAI S&I Pathway makes our RAI policy tractable for implementation,” Hicks wrote in the foreword.

“It directs the Department’s strategic approach for operationalizing the DoD AI Ethical Principles and, more broadly, advancing RAI – all while ensuring operational agility, maintaining speed of capability deployment, providing scalability, and prioritizing the efficient allocation of resources,” she added.

The 47-page document outlines goals for each of the six foundational tenets.

These include modernizing governance structures and processes that allow for continuous oversight of the department’s use of AI, reaching a standard level of technological proficiency and familiarity for system operators to achieve justified confidence in AI capabilities and AI-enabled systems and using the requirements validation process to ensure that capabilities leveraging AI are aligned with operational requirements while addressing relevant AI risks.

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