This year, CSET researchers returned to the DEF CON cybersecurity conference to explore how understandings of AI red-teaming practices have evolved among cybersecurity practitioners and AI experts. This blog post, a companion to "How I Won DEF CON’s Generative AI Red-Teaming Challenge", summarizes our takeaways and concludes with a list of outstanding research questions regarding AI red-teaming, some of which CSET hopes to address in future work. Read More

In August 2024, CSET Research Fellow Colin Shea-Blymyer attended DEF CON, the world’s largest hacking convention to break powerful artificial intelligence systems. He participated in the AI red-teaming challenge, and won. This blog post details his experiences with the challenge, what it took to win the grand prize, and what he learned about the state of AI testing. Read More

In his op-ed in Lawfare, Sam Bresnick discusses the evolving military strategies of China under Xi Jinping, highlighting the country's increasing engagement in risky military activities across while simultaneously exhibiting a reluctance to responsibly manage military crises with the U.S. Read More

Last Thursday, OpenAI introduced its latest model, dubbed “OpenAI o1.” While notable for its performance on a range of difficult tasks and benchmarks — the San Francisco-based AI lab says the model significantly outperformed its flagship GPT-4o model on competitive math and coding benchmarks — o1 has many excited because of… Read More

Artificial intelligence is becoming more integrated into the sciences. One of the scientific fields experiencing this is computational biology, which uses computer modeling to understand biological mechanisms and systems. This blog post provides an understanding of important research trends in these subject areas, and how advancements in AI can improve the speed and efficiency of computational biology to improve human health and well-being. Read More

This blog post recounts the development of a Python-based data collection pipeline project completed in the summer of 2024 by CSET inaugural intern Jordan Monts. During his project research and work, he used the Requests and BeautifulSoup libraries to create a two-part system to gather and process web data, support ongoing research initiatives, and strengthen his skills in data processing as well as application programming interface (API) management. Read More

This blog post analyzes five major Chinese AI governance proposals, focusing on the key actors specified in each proposal. We find that older proposals lack specificity when identifying AI governance actors. Recent proposals, on the other hand, assign roles and responsibilities to a defined set of actors. The findings from this blog post can help policymakers and analysts better understand China’s fast-evolving AI governance landscape. Read More

In their Lawfare op-ed, Helen Toner and Zachary Arnold discuss the growing concerns and divisions within the AI community regarding the risks posed by artificial intelligence. Read More

In his op-ed in TIME, Jack Corrigan discusses the landmark antitrust ruling that officially named Google a monopoly, marking the first significant antitrust defeat for a major internet platform in over two decades. Read More

Since 2022, U.S. export controls have restricted the highest-performing AI chips from being exported to China. The Biden administration likely did not intend to control CPUs (i.e., general-purpose processors) with these restrictions. However, CPUs are increasingly subject to export controls because chip designers are incorporating specialized elements for AI computation into CPUs. In this blog post, we discuss the implications of controlling AI-capable CPUs and make recommendations for the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) at the U.S. Department of Commerce. Read More