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.
CDT and Partners Urge New York Governor to Veto the Stealth Crawler Prohibition Act
The bill would require an automated tool accessing publicly available news websites to disclose data indicating its nature, purpose, parent company, and user it serves, and, unrealistically, every possible future use of the information it collects.
Congress Should Protect Children Online Without Sacrificing Privacy and Free Expression
CDT is urging lawmakers to pursue protections that address the underlying incentives and data practices that place young people at risk—without imposing broad censorship mandates or forcing people to surrender their privacy to access online services.
How Policymakers Can Address AI Auditing and Assessment Requirements
As more state policymakers consider third-party AI auditing or assessment requirements, these policies face important challenges to their effectiveness.
Fortunately, states are beginning to place sensible and much-needed safeguards on facial recognition. CDT recommends considering several policy priorities to address the risks of misidentification, dragnet surveillance, and other abuse of facial recognition.
The FTC’s proposed framework wrongly treats standard technical steps that are needed to train AI models, and ensure they are accurate, reliable, fair, and safe, as potential “deceptive steering” away from an assumed “neutral” baseline.
CDT, EFF, EPIC, and Upturn Submit Comments on GSA’s Updated Draft AI Terms and Conditions for Federal Contracts
Today, the Center for Democracy & Technology and allies submitted comments to the General Services Administration (GSA) in response to the request for comment regarding their updated draft AI Terms and Conditions for federal solicitations and contracts.
Bias at Scale: Understanding AI’s Impact on Student Achievement and Opportunity Gaps
Schools have an opportunity and responsibility to ensure that new technologies support, rather than undermine, their longstanding goal of expanding opportunity.
CDT and Allies Urge FCC Not to Violate Privacy of Cell Phone Buyers
CDT and EPIC led a coalition of 15 organizations in urging the FCC not to require phone companies to collect government IDs, physical addresses, and alternate phone numbers from every phone subscriber in the country.
General-purpose AI Code of Practice Implementation: A Rights Blindspot
CDT Europe's analysis of the entry into application of the European Commission’s enforcement powers towards general-purpose AI (GPAI) models, detailed and operationalised in the GPAI Code of Practice.
CDT Europe’s Analysis of the EU Special Panel Report on Child Safety Online
CDT Europe’s analysis of the EU Special Panel Report on Child Safety Online, which looks into the key recommendations of the report, noting its strengths whilst underlining some blind spots that merit additional attention to ensure that subsequent policy developments strike a delicate, yet critical, balance between protecting children online and safeguarding fundamental rights.
CDT Submits Comments Urging Careful Approach for Expansion of Do Not Pay System
CDT urges agencies to protect the personal data with which they have been entrusted by applying robust data minimization practices, enacting strong security protocols, limiting redisclosure, and mitigating data quality issues.
