Pentagon Set To Roll Out First-Ever AI Strategy

The U.S. Dept. of Defense could release its inaugural artificial intelligence (AI) strategy as soon as this week, reports Defense One.

The document will focus on near-term operations and safety and will emphasize the formation and tailoring of tools to allow service branches and commands to quickly integrate AI operations.

One imperative is to "translate the [AI] technology into decisions and impact in operations," according to an unnamed official with direct knowledge of the strategy.

The strategy will maintain a 2012 directive that requires a human to remain "in the loop" to oversee and override an autonomous weapon’s actions.

The strategy focuses on near-term, operational applications. Part of the motivation for this approach is to force operators and commanders to think through the safety and ethical implications of their activities as they work to determine how to best employ AI.

The strategy also calls for building an AI-ready workforce, drawing lessons from existing open online courses that can quickly train people to work on machine learning.

The Pentagon's efforts to take advantage of AI developments has come under fire from some in the private sector. As a result, the department is drafting a set of ethical principles and reaching out to academia and ethicists for help.

"Ethical codes can only help close the AI accountability gap if they are truly built into the processes of AI development and are backed by enforceable mechanisms of responsibility that are accountable to the public interest," according to a white paper from the AI Now Institute of New York University that sets out reservations programmers and technologists have with the military use of AI.