Consortium includes more than 200 leading AI stakeholders and will support the U.S. AI Safety Institute at NIST.

Today, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo announced the creation of the U.S. AI Safety InstituteConsortium (AISIC), which will unite AI creators and users, academics, government and industry researchers, and civil society organizations in support of the development and deployment of safe and trustworthy artificial intelligence (AI). The consortium will be housed under the U.S. AI Safety Institute (USAISI) and will contribute to priority actions outlined in President Biden’s landmark Executive Order, including developing guidelines for red-teaming, capability evaluations, risk management, safety and security, and watermarking synthetic content.

The President’s Executive Order (EO) on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (14110) issued on October 30, 2023, charges multiple agencies – including NIST – with producing guidelines and taking other actions to advance the safe, secure, and trustworthy development and use of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The EO directs NIST is to:

• Develop a companion resource to the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, NIST AI 100-1 for  generative AI.
• Develop a companion resource to the NIST Secure Software Development Framework to incorporate secure-development practices for generative AI and dual-use foundation models.
• Launch a new initiative to create guidance and benchmarks for evaluating AI capabilities, with a focus on capabilities that could cause harm.
• Develop and help to ensure the availability of testing environments in coordination with the Department of Energy (DoE) and the National Science Foundation (NSF).
• Establish guidelines and processes – except for AI used as a component of a national security system – to enable developers of generative AI, especially dual-use foundation models, to conduct AI red-teaming tests to enable deployment of safe, secure, and trustworthy systems. 
• Initiate an effort to engage with industry and relevant stakeholders to develop guidelines for possible use by synthetic nucleic acid sequence providers. 
• Develop a report to the Director of OMB and the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs identifying existing standards, tools, methods, and practices, as well as the potential development of further science-backed standards and techniques for authenticating, labeling or detecting synthetic content; preventing generative AI from producing child sexual abuse material or producing non-consensual intimate imagery of real individuals; and testing software for the above mentioned purposes. 
• Create guidelines for agencies to evaluate the efficacy of differential-privacy-guarantee protections, including for AI.
• Establish a plan for global engagement on promoting and developing AI standards.

Most of the EO tasks to NIST have a 270 day deadline. 

NIST will seek public comment on draft documents produced under the EO.

For EO-related questions email: ai-inquiries@nist.gov.