On September 19, 2023, one of us had the opportunity to testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Spending Oversight, chaired by Senator Maggie Hassan. Members of the subcommittee asked for an actionable plan for the U.S. government (USG) to address concerns about emerging technologies, like AI, synthetic biology and genetic engineering, and quantum technologies. This blog post endeavors to summarize near term policy recommendations based on CSET research as well as our best guesses about what is needed to address emerging concerns about these technologies.

The August 9 Executive Order aims to restrict certain U.S. investments in key technology areas. In a previous post, we proposed an end-user approach to crafting an AI investment prohibition. In this follow-on post, we rely on existing and hypothetical transactions to test scenarios where U.S. investments in China’s AI ecosystem would or would not be covered under the proposed program, and highlight outstanding challenges.

The EU AI Act is nearing formal adoption and implementation. Read this blog post, with updated analysis following the December 2023 political agreement, by CSET’s resident EU expert and Research Fellow, Mia Hoffmann. Learn what we know about the Act and what it means for AI regulation in the EU (and the world).

On September 8, 2023, Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) released their Bipartisan Framework on AI Legislation. The framework includes many ideas and recommendations that CSET research has highlighted over the past four years. This blog post highlights some of the most relevant reports and CSET’s perspective on the framework’s elements.

The Replicator effort by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is intended to overcome some of the military challenges posed by China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA). This blog post intends to both identify tradeoffs for the Department to consider as it charts the path for Replicator, and to provide a sense for the state of industry readiness to support.

Universities can build more inclusive computer science programs by addressing the reasons that students may be deterred from pursuing the field. This blog post explores some of those reasons, features of CS education that cause them, and provides recommendations on how to design learning experiences that are safer and more exploratory for everyone.

The much-anticipated National Cyber Workforce and Education Strategy (NCWES) provides a comprehensive set of strategic objectives for training and producing more cyber talent by prioritizing and encouraging the development of more localized cyber ecosystems that serve the needs of a variety of communities rather than trying to prescribe a blanket policy. This is a much-needed and reinvigorated approach that understands the unavoidable inequities in both cyber education and workforce development, but provides strategies for mitigating them. In this blog post, we highlight key elements that could be easily overlooked.

Drawing from prior CSET research, this blog post describes different domestic and international initiatives the Chinese government and companies are pursuing to shore up investment in AI and meet China’s strategic objectives, as well as indicators to track their future trajectories.

Recent discussions of AI have focused on safety, reliability, and other risks. Lost in this debate is the real need to secure AI against malicious actors. This blog post applies lessons from traditional cybersecurity to emerging AI-model risks.

The goal of this guide is to acquaint researchers and analysts with tools, resources, and best practices to ensure security when collecting or accessing open-source information.