Biden Administration Building on Trump Strategies on AI, 5G

President Joe Biden's administration is developing policies on AI, 5G and other areas, likely building on work done under the last administration, NTIA officials said during an FCBA webinar Tuesday. Last year, under then-President Donald Trump, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology recommended increased national focus on AI (see 2007010041). At CES last year, the Trump administration unveiled principles to govern private-sector AI development (see 2001080067).

“We have a new team, a new administration, and all of these issues are being grappled with as they come in,” said acting NTIA Administrator Evelyn Remaley. “AI is not the future, but it’s already regularly in use across the federal government.” Trump administration recommendations on a national 5G strategy remain “very relevant,” she said. That administration released its 5G security strategy days before Biden took office (see 2101150071). The strategy focused on the need for R&D, testing and “demonstrations and development of advanced 5G systems,” she said: “Security is a key piece.”

The “new team is coming in, thinking through what some of their specific priorities [are] where they want to focus,” Remaley said. NTIA is building a 5G testbed and lab in Boulder, Colorado, which will examine security issues, she said. Industry is also doing research, she said.

The U.S. is working with its "allies" on AI, “really trying to hone in on where our views align and where we can find common grounds, and that’s something we’re doing on a daily basis,” said Jaisha Wray, associate administrator, Office of International Affairs. One recurring issue is how to deal with authoritarian governments, she said. “These are very complicated issues,” she said. “The administration is still quite new, and it’s hard to say what new initiatives we will prioritize.”

Spectrum management is moving to AI but is still “heavily manual,” said Charles Cooper, associate administrator, Office of Spectrum Management. We need to move to a “more machine-to-machine process where devices talk among themselves,” he said. One example is Wi-Fi, managed “on a machine-to-machine basis,” he said: “You don’t have the regulators in the way there.”

Incumbent informing capability, the subject of a recent NTIA paper (see 2102220050), requires AI and the management of a large amount of data but will be important to the future of spectrum sharing, Cooper said. “That’s the world we want to live in in spectrum management,” he said: “It’s going to be a ways before we get there.”

The U.S. worked hard on 2019 AI principles by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the Biden administration supports them, Wray said (see 1905220068). “Over the last several years, countries have increasingly come to international institutions with ideas on how to reckon with AI’s informative power” and how democratic governments can “harness” that power, she said: One concern is AI “could be taken advantage of” by despotic governments for surveillance and policing of their citizens.