We Need a Drastic Rethink on Export Controls for AI

Dave Aitel is the founder and CTO of Immunity. You can follow him @daveaitel. Export control on AI and machine learning algorithms is becoming a more important part of national security strategy as the world moves to a great-power competition landscape and technological changes force accommodation and rapid change to many national interests. However, like security software before it, AI presents unique challenges to how export control has traditionally worked, and these should be considered before being codified into international regulatory frameworks. As an example, on January 6, 2020, The Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) in the U.S. Department of Commerce released the following rule, which imposed a license requirement on a particular kind of software useful for automatically identifying objects from drone or other imagery: "Geospatial imagery "software" "specially designed" for training a Deep Convolutional Neural Network to automate the analysis of geospatial imagery and point clouds, and having all of the following: Technical Note: A point cloud is a collection of data points defined by a given coordinate system. A point cloud is also known as a digital surface model."