Consumers should expect vendors producing artificial intelligence systems to put in place safety and security measures rather than have them prescribed by the government, the CEO of Google Cloud’s public sector division said.
Mandates defining how to reach particular targets are not appropriate, said the CEO, Karen Dahut.
“You have to expect that the model providers are ensuring that safety and security,” Dahut told Punchbowl News.
President Joe Biden’s approach, laid out last year with support from several top commercial AI providers, including Google, emphasizes security testing and a wide conception of the harms and biases AI should avoid. The administration has also relied on collaboration between companies, government and academia.
“What the administration has done around ensuring security of AI algorithms and all, that’s really good language that we all can live by,” Dahut said.
The sector isn’t ready for lawmakers and regulators to put in place a “step-by-step process for how to” ensure safety, though, Dahut added.
Dahut’s comments underscore that AI companies mostly don’t want Congress or regulators breathing down their necks about nascent technology.
But these tech companies also don’t love the idea of having wasted the voluntary work they did with the Biden administration to lay the groundwork for future light-touch regulation.
Dahut’s Hill agenda: Dahut, whose division sells cloud services to government agencies, said she visits Congress quarterly to meet with appropriators, defense policy committees and others. Her top priorities are security, procurement strategies that bring in multiple cloud vendors and accreditation of technology for government use.
“The… rules that are in place today for how technologies and emerging technologies get accredited are outdated,” Dahut said.
The competition: Dahut said she and Thomas Kurian, the CEO of Google Cloud, still have to reassure government officials that the company is committed to working with the Pentagon and the intelligence community. Back in 2018, due to employee pressure, Google pulled out of Project Maven, a Defense Department program using AI to help target drones.
“Our competitors like to say, ‘Google’s not really committed,’” Dahut said. “We hear that from customers.”
Since Dahut joined two years ago, she and Kurian have frequently “made the point to say, ‘We are in; we are all in.’” Dahut said that she does find herself reiterating the issue less and less.
One topic Dahut says she doesn’t hear about is the Justice Department’s two antitrust cases against Google, which focus on search and ads rather than cloud.
“The antitrust suit has never come up in a client conversation with me,” Dahut declared. “I think that says something.”
