AI Is a National-Security Danger
Artificial intelligence poses threats to U.S. national security, and the Biden administration takes them seriously. On Oct. 30 the president signed a wide-ranging executive order on artificial intelligence. Among other things, it mandates that a significant portion of the nation’s AI industry must now check its models for national-security vulnerabilities and potential misuses. This means assembling a “red team” of experts to try to make their AIs do dangerous things—and then devising ways of protecting against similar threats from outside. This isn’t a mere bureaucratic exercise. It is a clarion call for a new era of responsibility. The executive order defines dual-use AI as any model “that is trained on broad data; generally uses self-supervision; contains at least tens of billions of p...