US Needs to Defend Its Artificial Intelligence Better, Says Pentagon No. 2

As the Pentagon rapidly builds and adopts artificial intelligence tools, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said military leaders increasingly are worried about a second-hand problem: AI safety. AI safety broadly refers to making sure that artificial intelligence programs don't wind up causing problems, no matter whether they were based on corrupted or incomplete data, were poorly designed, or were hacked by attackers. AI safety is often seen as an afterthought as companies rush to build, sell, and adopt machine learning tools. But the Department of Defense is obligated to put a little more attention into the issue, Hicks said Monday at the Defense One Tech Summit. "As you look at testing evaluation and validation and verification approaches, these are areas where we know--whether you're in the commercial sector, the government sector, and certainly if you look abroad, there is not a lot happening in terms of safety," she said.