NATO’s new AI Strategy, Facebook ditches facial recognition, and signs of life for the stalled tech competitiveness bill?

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Worth Knowing

NATO Announces AI Strategy and Billion Euro Innovation Fund: The North Atlantic Treaty Organization announced the adoption of a new AI strategy and the creation of a €1 billion “NATO Innovation Fund” to support emerging tech innovation. The full strategy has not been released, but a summary outlines its aims, including: developing responsible AI for the alliance’s defense, accelerating AI adoption and increasing interoperability, and defending against AI threats. The strategy also outlines six “Principles of Responsible Use of Artificial Intelligence in Defence” — lawfulness, responsibility and accountability, explainability and traceability, reliability, governability, and bias mitigation — that the alliance’s members pledged to observe. The simultaneously-announced NATO Innovation Fund, meanwhile, will invest in “dual-use technologies of potential application to defence and security.” As Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg explained, the fund — together with NATO’s tech accelerator announced earlier this year — will help the alliance harness innovation from the private sector and incorporate emerging technologies into its arsenal.
European Commission Deals Another Blow to Nvidia-Arm Deal: Last week, the European Commission opened an in-depth investigation into Nvidia’s $40 billion acquisition of British chip designer Arm, another speed bump for the proposed deal, which was struck last year. In launching the investigation, Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager said the deal “could lead to restricted or degraded access to Arm’s IP, with distortive effects in many markets where semiconductors are used.” Often called “the Switzerland of chips” for its relatively neutral approach to licensing, Arm sells its chip designs to more than 500 companies worldwide — many of them Nvidia’s direct competitors. Concerns that the Nvidia merger would put those relationships at risk contributed to a similar investigation in the UK, launched earlier this year. The Commission has until March 15, 2022 to reach a decision on whether to block the deal.  
Facebook Closes the Book on Face Recognition: On Tuesday, Facebook announced that it plans to shut down its facial recognition system. The company originally introduced the system in 2010, but while it made photo tagging and sharing easier, it also prompted years of criticism, lawsuits, and regulatory crackdown. A post from the company’s VP of AI said Facebook will continue to research and develop facial recognition technology, but it will delete the more than one billion facial recognition templates — digital scans of users’ faces — that powered its system. The news is the latest development in what has been a busy few months for the tech giant, breaking a week after Facebook’s parent company changed its name to “Meta” — meant to indicate its growing focus on building the “metaverse.” The rebranding came soon after former Facebook employee Frances Haugen’s leaked trove of documents to The Wall Street Journal — dubbed “The Facebook Files” — as well as her testimony before Congress about the company’s negative effects on mental health, political violence, and national security. While the decision to shutter its facial recognition system may earn the company some rare plaudits from its critics, it seems unlikely to stem the tide of criticism that Haugen’s leaks and testimony helped unleash.  
Government Updates

Signs of Movement for Tech Competitiveness Bill Stuck in the Mud: With the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act (USICA) bogged down in the House, its backers are looking for ways to kickstart its progress — or at least save some of its popular aspects. The bill, passed by the Senate in June, aims to bolster competitiveness with China by pouring more than $200 billion into U.S. R&D and high tech manufacturing, including $52 billion in incentives for domestic semiconductor manufacturing (for more details on the bill, see our June coverage). While the bill’s backers initially hoped the House would quickly follow in the Senate’s footsteps by passing its own version of the bill, those efforts stalled. Last month, Politico reported that some Senate Democrats had proposed rolling the $52 billion in chip funding into the annual National Defense Authorization Act, which has yet to come up for full Senate consideration. That attempt was apparently shot down by key USICA backers, including Sens. Young and Wicker. Now, Politico reports that momentum is building to conference various China competition bills in the House with the USICA in order to finally get the bill to President Biden’s desk. Talks are still in early stages, though, and it could be some time before they bear any fruit.    

Counterintelligence Chief Warns of Threats to U.S. Emerging Tech: The National Counterintelligence and Security Center, which leads U.S. counterintelligence efforts, is prioritizing the defense of five key technologies — AI, autonomous systems, semiconductors, quantum computing, and biotech — in the face of threats from China and Russia. According to a document released by the center, the NCSC will increase its outreach to companies and researchers in these fields to help them guard against economic espionage. Mike Orlando, who took over as acting director of the NCSC earlier this year, said these state-backed campaigns have targeted “hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth” of U.S. technology, through both illicit and licit means. While a number of espionage cases (including unsuccessful ones) have drawn attention to the former, Orlando warned that some forms of legal cooperation — including research partnerships, acquisitions and investments, and talent recruitment — also put U.S. research at risk. In addition to stepped-up outreach efforts, the NCSC has created a new position focused specifically on counterintelligence for emerging and disruptive technologies.

U.S. and UK Forces Test Joint AI Capabilities: Last month, the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory and the UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory conducted a successful demonstration of their joint machine learning capabilities. During a simulated combat situation, the two labs used a common development and deployment platform to quickly share data and select well-suited algorithms and AI capabilities. The teams made use of UK-developed Model Cards — brief summaries of a model’s purpose and underlying features — to efficiently select appropriate models, as well as the U.S. government’s StreamlinedML, a platform meant to build and deploy machine learning workflows. The exercise was the result of a four-year partnership agreement, signed last year, meant to improve U.S.-UK collaboration on AI and autonomy, with similar demonstrations expected over the coming years.

In Translation
CSET’s translations of significant foreign language documents on AI

Shanghai S&T Five-Year Plan: Shanghai Municipal “14th Five-Year” Plan for Building a Science and Technology Innovation Center with Global Influence. This document is an excerpted translation of Shanghai’s five-year plan for S&T development. This is one of many detailed provincial-level economic development plans likely to follow in the wake of China’s national 14th Five-Year Plan, which was released in March 2021. Shanghai’s plan identifies a raft of emerging technologies that the city government aims to boost, and proposes a major expansion and refinement of the city’s tech transfer apparatus. This lengthy translated excerpt covers the following sections of Shanghai’s plan: part I (overview), part III (basic research and innovation), part IV (key and core technologies), part VI (talent), and part X (innovation environment). 

If you have a foreign-language document related to security and emerging technologies that you’d like translated into English, CSET may be able to help! Click here for details.

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What’s New at CSET

REPORTSPUBLICATIONSFORECASTS
Foretell has launched a new project that combines expert and crowd judgment. You can read more about the experts’ views, including how they think trends like China’s military aggression, political polarization, and the strength of the tech sector affect the DOD-Silicon Valley relationship. See all 20 forecast questions associated with this project here.

IN THE NEWS
What We’re Reading

Report: Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2021: Annual Report to Congress, Office of the Secretary of Defense (November 2021) 

Article: China Flaunts Its Offensive Cyber Power, J.D. Work, War on the Rocks (October 2021) 

Report: Strengthening international cooperation on AI, Cameron F. Kerry, Joshua P. Meltzer, Andrea Renda, Alex Engler and Rosanna Fanni, Brookings (October 2021) 

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