From facial recognition tools to algorithms that identify diseases, agencies reported that they didn't know enough about what they're acquiring from commercial vendors.
Federal agencies are acquiring dozens of proprietary AI algorithms for tasks that can affect people’s physical safety and civil rights without having access to detailed information about how the systems work or were trained, according to newly released data.
And for more than 100 algorithms that can impact people’s safety and rights, the agency using the models didn’t have access to source code that explains how they work.recently enacted rules for federal AI procurement and safety, the inventory data shows how heavily the government has come to rely on private companies for its riskiest AI systems.
For at least 25 safety or rights-impacting systems, agencies reported that “no documentation exists regarding maintenance, composition, quality, or intended use of the training and evaluation data.” For at least 105 of them, agencies said they did not have access to source code. Agencies didn’t answer the documentation question for 51 of the tools or the source code question for 60 of the tools. Some of the high-risk systems are still in the development or acquisition phase.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in comments submitted to OMB about the new rules, said “the government should not request any specific training data or data sets on AI models that the government acquires from vendors.” Palantir, a major AI supplier, wrote that the federal government should “avoid overly prescribing rigid documentation instruments, and instead give AI service providers and vendors the needed leeway to characterize context-specific risk.
“Procurement is one of the most important governance mechanisms, it’s where the rubber meets the road, it’s the front door, it’s where you can decide whether or not to let the bad stuff in,” she said. “You need to understand whether the data in that model is representative, is it biased or unbiased? What did they do with that data and where did it come from? Did all of it come from Reddit or Quora? Because if it did, it may not be what you need.
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