This paper is the fifth installment in a series on “AI safety,” an area of machine learning research that aims to identify causes of unintended behavior in machine learning systems and develop tools to ensure these systems work safely and reliably. This paper explores the opportunities and challenges of building AI systems that “know what they don’t know.”

President Biden's October 2023 executive order prioritizes the governance of artificial intelligence in the federal government, prompting the urgent creation of AI risk management standards and procurement guidelines. Soon after the order's signing, the Office of Management and Budget issued guidance for federal departments and agencies, including minimum risk standards for AI in federal contracts. Similar to cybersecurity, procurement rules will be used to enforce AI development best practices for federal suppliers. This report offers recommendations for implementing AI risk management procurement rules.

Artificial Intelligence incidents have been occurring with the rapid advancement of AI capabilities over the past decade. However, there is not yet a concerted policy effort in the United States to monitor, document, and aggregate AI incident data to enhance the understanding of AI-related harm and inform safety policies. This report proposes a federated approach consisting of hybrid incident reporting frameworks to standardize reporting practices and prevent missing data.

On February 2, 2024, CSET's Assessment and CyberAI teams submitted a response to NIST's Request for Information related to the Executive Order Concerning Artificial Intelligence (88 FR 88368). In the submission, CSET compiles recommendations from six CSET reports and analyses in order to assist NIST in its implementation of AI Executive Order requirements.

CSET submitted the following comment in response to a Request for Comment (RFC) from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) about a draft memorandum providing guidance to government agencies regarding the appointment of Chief AI Officers, Risk Management for AI, and other processes following the October 30, 2023 Executive Order on AI.

Standards enable good governance practices by establishing consistent measurement and norms for interoperability, but creating standards for AI is a challenging task. The Center for Security and Emerging Technology and the Center for a New American Security hosted a series of workshops in the fall of 2022 to examine standards development in the areas of finance, worker safety, cybersecurity, sustainable buildings, and medical devices in order to apply the lessons learned in these domains to AI. This workshop report summarizes our findings and recommendations.

AI has the potential to revolutionize approaches to climate change research. Using CSET's Map of Science, this data brief maps the production of research publications at the intersection of AI and climate change to better understand how AI methods are being applied to climate change-related research.

Scout is ETO's discovery tool for Chinese-language writing on science and technology. Scout compiles, tags, and summarizes news and commentary from selected Chinese sources, helping English-speaking users easily keep up to date, skim the latest news, and discover new perspectives. Use the Scout web interface to browse and filter articles, or get customized updates delivered to your inbox through the Scout email service.

CSET Executive Director Dr. Dewey Murdick testified before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Emerging Threats Subcommittee on challenges related to emerging technologies and national security.

This explainer defines criteria for effective AI Incident Collection and identifies tradeoffs between potential reporting models: mandatory, voluntary, and citizen reporting.