CDT Joins Mozilla, Civil Society Orgs, and Leading Academics in Urging U.S. Secretary of Commerce to Protect AI Openness
The Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) joined Mozilla and nearly fifty civil society organizations and scholars in a letter to U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, urging her to protect openness and transparency in AI. The joint letter is in response to a public consultation process run by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) at the Department of Commerce, to examine the risks, benefits, and potential policy approaches related to open models for AI.
The letter highlights the many clear benefits of an open ecosystem of AI models, analogizing to the similar benefits–to competition, innovation, security, and transparency– that open source software has delivered over the past thirty years. It further notes that there is still a dearth of clear evidence that such open models pose a significantly different risk compared to that posed by closed models or by access to the internet itself. Therefore, the letter concludes, the Administration should avoid broad, heavy-handed restrictions on the publication of such models in favor of more tailored applications of specific laws to specific harms.
Coalition Urges Senate Not to Let Companies Waive Financial Regulations for AI
CDT joined AI Now Institute, American Civil Liberties Union, and several organizations dedicated to tech policy, consumer protection, and civil rights in a letter to Senate leadership and the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee opposing the “AI Innovation Labs” language in Sec. 10509 of the CLARITY Act.
As concern about risks and harms related to AI systems continue to grow, a growing chorus of policymakers, industry leaders, and advocates have called for independent AI assessments. This explainer provides an overview of recent proposals for third-party assessment in the United States, including state and federal legislation, executive actions, and industry proposals.
Having third parties assess AI systems might seem like common sense, but crafting effective policies toward this goal can be devilishly tricky. A poorly-constructed ecosystem for third-party assessment could easily fail to consider the most consequential mechanisms of risk, neglect the AI harms that most impact people, or do more to protect AI companies than people.
Not All Guardrails Are Created Equal: Comparing Content Safety and Copyright Filtering
As courts and policymakers work through questions about chatbot liability, they should be wary of analogies that flatten meaningful technical differences. Copyright filtering and safety intervention share real challenges around ambiguity and evasion, but they diverge in what each control must assess, how each manifests over the course of a conversation, and how much can be verified from the outside.
