In the letter, shared exclusively with FedScoop, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., urged the LOC’s copyright office to expand an existing “good-faith security research exemption” to include research that exists outside of traditional security concerns, such as bias, arguing that it would be the best path for ensuring a “robust security ecosystem” for tools such as generative AI. 

The letter from Warner, co-chair of the Senate Cybersecurity Caucus, is in response to a petition from Jonathan Weiss, founder of the IT consulting firm Chinnu Inc., that asked the LOC to establish a new exemption to address security research on generative AI models and systems. 

A spokesperson for Warner said in an email that an expansion to the exemption rather than an entirely new exemption “is the best way to extend the existing protections that have enabled a robust cybersecurity research ecosystem to the emerging issues surrounding safe AI.”

Warner’s letter mirrors a Department of Justice response to the same petition last month. The Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section of the DOJ’s Criminal Division wrote that “good faith research on potentially harmful outputs of AI and similar algorithmic systems should be similarly exempted from the DMCA’s circumvention provisions.”

Said Warner: “It is crucial that we allow researchers to test systems in ways that demonstrate how malfunctions, misuse and misoperation may lead to an increased risk of physical or psychological harm.”

The Virginia Democrat, who has introduced bipartisan legislation on artificial intelligence security and emerging tech standards, pointed to the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s AI Risk Management Framework to acknowledge that AI’s risks “differ from traditional software risks in key ways,” opening the door for not only security vulnerabilities but also dangerous and biased outputs. 

The use of generative AI for fraud and non-consensual image generation are among the deceptive practices Warner noted as reasons for consumer protections, such as watermarks and content credentials. Additionally, the lawmaker asked the LOC to ensure that the potential expanded exemption “does not immunize” research that would intentionally undermine protective measures. 

“Absent very clear indicia of good faith, efforts that undermine provenance technology should not be entitled to the expanded exemption,” Warner said. 

The senator also asked the LOC to include security and safety vulnerabilities, especially involving bias and additional harmful outputs, in its expanded good-faith security research definition.

In response to Warner’s letter, Weiss said in an email to FedScoop that he doesn’t “care whether the existing exemption is expanded to include research on AI bias/harmful output, or whether an entirely new exemption is created. Our main concern is to secure protections for good faith research on these emerging intelligent systems, whose inner workings even the brightest minds in the world cannot currently explain.”

The Weiss petition and letters from DOJ and Warner were prompted by the LOC Copyright Office’s ninth triennial rulemaking proceeding, which accepts public input for new exemptions to the DMCA.

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The NSF AI Education Act of 2024, introduced Thursday by Sens. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., and Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., supports investments in science, technology, engineering and mathematics education, part of an effort to “help make certain the U.S. is an AI leader in the next century,” Moran said in a press release. 

The legislation would not only authorize NSF to grant fellowships and scholarships within AI and quantum education — along with awarding fellowships for professional development — but would also allow the agency to conduct an outreach campaign throughout the nation that increases awareness of its educational opportunities. The campaign would prioritize outreach to “rural and underserved areas,” per the bill summary.

“Demand for AI expertise is already high and will continue to grow,” Cantwell said in the release. “This bill will open doors to AI for students at all levels and upskill our workforce to drive American tech innovation entrepreneurship and progress in solving the toughest global challenges.”

The bill would also direct NSF to create publicly available playbooks about introducing AI into classrooms for pre-K through 12th-grade students, with “consideration for rural and economically depressed areas.”

NSF would also be granted authorization to hold a grand challenge for AI education and training that would include strategies for upskilling 1 million workers in the United States. in AI-related areas by 2028. Bipartisan Senate legislation released earlier this month also charges NSF with administering a grand challenge, with $1 million prizes awarded for innovations in AI.   

The bill from Moran and Cantwell also calls for related frameworks that “promote increasing the number of women who receive AI education and training” and ensure that “rural areas of the United States are able to benefit from artificial intelligence education and training.”

“Artificial intelligence has tremendous potential, but it will require a skilled and capable workforce to unlock its capabilities,” Moran said. “If we want to fully understand AI and remain globally competitive, we must invest in the future workforce today.”

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During the Workday Federal Forum, GSA Administrator Robin Carnahan teased that the agency is working on an open-source tool called “Gov CX Analyzer,” which uses artificial intelligence features to see how individuals are interacting with government websites.

“This is a way to go from a few thousand people filling out a survey, to actually knowing and seeing how people are interacting with your site,” Carnahan said. “It just completely unlocks the potential to know how you can better serve your customers, where the friction points are and how you can improve it.” 

Carnahan pointed to the U.S. Web Design System — an open-source tool that is free for agencies to use — as a shared system and tool that “makes a huge difference.” 

Similar efforts include an announcement from the Office of Management and Budget last year that detailed an analytics tool to track customer experience performance across agency sites. OMB reported leveraging the GSA’s site scanner program to use performance indicators in the tracking of agencies’ site developments.

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The Technical Advisory Group, part of a broader effort to engage stakeholders and support FedRAMP processes related to delivering emerging technology solutions to assist agencies, will inform decision-making on the technical, strategic and operational direction of the government-wide compliance program, according to a GSA press release. 

“This group will help make FedRAMP a smarter and more technology-forward operation that better meets its goals of making it safe and easy for federal agencies to take full advantage of cloud services,” Eric Mill, GSA’s executive director for cloud strategy in Technology Transformation Services, said in the statement. 

Members of the inaugural group are: Laura Beaufort, technical lead with the Federal Election Commission; Paul Hirsch, technical lead with TTS; Michael Boyce, director of DHS’s AI Corps; Elizabeth Schweinsberg, senior technical adviser at CMS; Grant Dasher, architecture branch chief in the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s Office of the Technical Director; Nicole Thompson, cybersecurity engineer with the Department of Defense’s Defense Digital Service; and Brian Turnau, cloud authorization program manager with GSA’s Office of the Chief Information Officer.

Laura Gerhardt, director of technology modernization and data in the Office of Management and Budget, said in a statement that “the TAG is well-positioned to provide valuable insights into streamlining processes, enhancing security postures and adapting to novel technology implementations so that agencies can leverage the full potential of FedRAMP.” 

GSA released a new roadmap for modernization efforts through the FedRAMP program in March and has since revealed a slew of other FedRAMP-related announcements.

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While facial recognition, a type of  biometric validation, is commonly used with law enforcement agencies, GSA sees the Login.gov pilot as a way to further defend against sophisticated fraud and cyber threats. The work with tech equity experts will “incorporate learnings, as applicable” into the pilot, a GSA spokesperson said in an email to FedScoop, and comes after the agency conducted an equity study on remote identity proofing to “improve outreach practices, user testing and user experience for underserved communities in civic tech design.”

The goal of the upcoming pilot, which will run through the fall, is to evaluate overall user experience throughout the new workflow and to find where individuals become stuck or confused throughout the process so the “team can iteratively make improvements,” the agency spokesperson said.

“Login.gov is committed to leveraging best-in-class facial matching algorithms that, based on testing in controlled environments, have been shown to offer high-levels of accuracy in reduced algorithmic bias,” they added. 

The equity study on remote identity proofing included 4,000 participants, as of April, who were tasked with testing five different vendors for this technology. GSA plans to release a report with the results from the equity study in a peer-reviewed publication this year. 

GSA recently concluded a procurement process that expands the set of “identity vendors” that Login.gov has access to, the spokesperson said. The agency shared plans to evaluate how and when to integrate new solutions. 

“The general availability launch timing is not dependent on this integration process,” the spokesperson said. 

Candice Wright, director of the Government Accountability Office’s Science, Technology Assessment and Analytics team, said in an email to FedScoop that the GSA’s equity study on remote identity can assist the agency in ensuring that the biometric validation technology is “more accurate for all demographic groups.”

“The accuracy of biometric identification technologies is improving overall, but there are still issues with technologies that can perform less accurately for certain subgroups, such as people with darker skin,” Wright said, pointing to a recent GAO report that found comprehensive evaluations of technology as a key consideration to assist in addressing differential performance.

The biometric validation tool, the GSA spokesperson said, uses a “privacy-preserving” approach that compares a selfie that a user takes against their photo identification. The spokesperson emphasized that the data provided by the user is “protected by ensuring it will never be used for any purpose unrelated to verifying your identity” by Login.gov or the vendors with whom it works. 

Login.gov’s biometric technology will be provided by a commercial vendor that, according to the spokesperson, employs an algorithm that is considered proprietary but is one of the leading options as measured by the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT).

“Agencies could achieve more comprehensive testing by providing guidance to technology vendors so that they design their products in ways that support more standardized testing,” Wright said.

NIST’s test for vendors, which last year was split into the Face Recognition Technology Evaluation (FRTE) and Face Analysis Technology Evaluation (FATE), measures the performance of facial recognition tech as it is applied across a variety of applications, such as visa image verification, identification of child exploitation images and more. 

The GSA noted last month that the biometric validation technology is compliant with NIST’s digital identity guidelines for achieving “evidence-based remote identity verification” at the IAL2 level, or the standard that “introduces the need for either remote or physically-present identity proofing.”

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TMF investments to the Departments of Education, Commerce and State total just under $50 million. 

The State Department received two investments: $18.2 million to increase diplomacy through generative AI and $13.1 million to transition its identity and access management systems to a zero-trust architecture model.

The AI investment is intended to “empower its widely dispersed team members to work more efficiently and improve access to enhanced information resources,” including diplomatic cables, media summaries and reports. On the zero trust investment, State said it is planning to expedite the creation of a comprehensive consolidated identity trust system, as well as centralizing workflows for the onboarding and offboarding process.

Clare Martorana, the federal CIO and TMF board chair, said in a statement that she’s “thrilled to see our catalytic funding stream powering the use of AI and improving security at the State Department.” 

State recently announced a chatbot for internal uses and revised its public AI use case inventory to remove nine items from the agency website. Additionally, the agency has started to encourage its workforce to use generative AI tools like ChatGPT. 

The Department of Education, meanwhile, is using a $5.9 million allocation to assist the Federal Student Aid office on a new StudentAid.gov feature called “My Activity” to centralize documents and data to track activities and status updates. The FSA is anticipating “a reduction in wait times and the need for customer care inquiries,” per the GSA release. 

Education also recently announced an RFI for cloud computing capabilities for the FSA office, a follow-on contract for its Next Generation Cloud. 

Finally, the Department of Commerce’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will put its $12 million TMF investment toward modernizing weather.gov through a redesign to “enhance information accessibility” and “establish a sustainable, mobile-first infrastructure.” NOAA reported plans to integrate translation capabilities for underserved communities’ benefit. 

The release noted that NOAA’s associated application programming interface “faces challenges, causing disruptions in accessing dependable weather information for the American public.”

Martorana said she was “equally excited about the TMF’s two other critical investments — with students getting more modern access to manage their education journeys and the public gaining access to life-saving weather information in an accessible manner for all.”

These investments come after a second appropriations package to fund the government for fiscal year 2024 threatened to claw back $100 million from the TMF. Both the GSA and the Office of Management and Budget have faced challenges in convincing lawmakers to meet funding levels proposed by the Biden administration.

Martorana recently called on Congress to fund the TMF, pointing to the funding vehicle as a way to improve service delivery for the public across the government.

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In the report, NRC staff recommended an AI framework for the agency to follow, which outlines approaches for AI governance, hiring new talent, upskilling existing workers, maturing the commission’s data management program and allocating resources to support AI integration into IT infrastructure. 

Additionally, NRC staff recommended that the agency invest in “foundational tools” by acquiring gen AI-based services and integrating AI in the NRC’s system for document access and management’s cognitive search technology.

“To effectively implement AI solutions, the NRC will need to develop a framework to deploy AI at the agency,” the report states. “As part of this effort, the NRC will continue to strengthen its many partnerships to stay current with the evolving state of AI. To achieve the promise of AI, leadership engagement will be essential.”

The report pushed for a collaborative approach to furthering the NRC’s use of the technology, pointing to the Chief AI Officers Council, the Responsible AI Officers Council, and other individual agency partnerships as being “essential to the agency’s response to the rapidly changing AI landscape.”

The NRC’s AI team — designated to lead this review by the agency’s executive director for operations — reported working closely with internal data scientists and subject matter experts to consider possible AI uses. Staff reviewed 61 AI use cases and identified 36 that align with tools that have AI capabilities, while the other 25 could “be addressed using non-AI solutions.”

The nuclear industry currently uses AI to “change its approach to some nonregulated activities and has expressed interest in using AI for NRC-regulated activities,” per the report, adding that the NRC is investing in AI research to identify where AI could build foundational knowledge across the agency, while still meeting its mission. 

Staff reported that the broad approach to AI research is “preparing the agency to use AI to increase staff knowledge and experience for future regulatory reviews and oversight.”

The NRC’s congressional budget justification for fiscal year 2025 carved out over $4 million for AI-related funds.

Correction: This story was updated May 13, 2024, to indicate that the nuclear industry, not the NRC, is using AI to alter its approach on some nonregulated activities.

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MITRE, which operates federally funded R&D centers on behalf of agencies, announced during the AI Expo for National Competitiveness that it anticipates applying the sandbox to “national security, healthcare, transportation and climate” according to the press release. The sandbox will be powered by AI data center infrastructure from NVIDIA. 

MITRE said it is offering federal entities access to the tool’s benefits through existing contracts with R&D centers that the organization operates with agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Department of Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration and others. 

Charles Clancy, senior vice president and chief technology officer at MITRE, referenced President Joe Biden’s October AI executive order that outlines a series of responsibilities and deadlines for agencies to use the technology and support its implementation. Agencies “often lack the computing environment necessary for implementation and prototyping,” Clancy said.

“Our new Federal AI Sandbox will help level the playing field, making the high-quality compute power needed to train and test custom AI solutions available to any agency,” he added. 

The sandbox provides computing power that is able to train AI applications such as large language models and other generative AI tools for government use, according to the press release. 

MITRE said the supercomputer is also able to “train multimodal perception systems that can understand and process information from multiple types of data at once,” including images, environmental and medical sensors, text, radar and more. 

Tuesday’s announcement comes nearly two months after the nonprofit announced the opening of a facility to test government use of AI for possible risks through red-teaming and human-in-the-loop experimentation.

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Released Thursday by the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the National Science and Technology (NSTC) subcommittee on Research and Development Infrastructure said in its report that old and “inadequate” infrastructure at the federal level is responsible for agencies’ inability to “meet their current missions.” The subcommittee pointed to a 2024 document from NASA that reported over 75% of the agency’s infrastructure and facilities are “beyond original life design” and the agency faces a $3 billion maintenance backlog.

“The challenges that the U.S. [R&D infrastructure] enterprise is experiencing are not new and reflect decades of inadequate funding due to deprioritizing and maintenance at existing facilities, developing of new facilities and decommissioning of outdated facilities,” the report states.

The subcommittee called on federal agencies to “continue to revitalize” R&D infrastructure through assessing and prioritizing investments needed for legacy facilities and future infrastructure. Doing so would serve the purpose of facilitating both domestic and international collaborations — like material exchanges and evaluating capabilities for respective mission areas — through “benchmarking activities,” according to the report. 

The NSTC also recognized the need to convene an interagency working group to exchange information regarding planning, capability gaps and collaboration opportunities. 

Significantly, the report reminds agencies that “facility closures may result in U.S. dependence on international facilities and weigh the consequences if those capabilities are no longer possessed by the United States or its allies.”

NSTC states that the U.S. does not have a “seat at the table” for setting international R&D infrastructure governance, since some international facilities charge a membership fee for access to outsiders. The report attributes the inaccessibility to limitations from the appropriations process and the Anti-Deficiency Act, which prohibits agencies from assigning federal funds in advance or excess of the appropriations. 

The report warns that without a U.S. voice in international R&D infrastructure governance, there remains “an opening for competitors like [China] and Russia to have greater say in the governance of platforms that may require the development of novel or dual-use technology.”

OSTP did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.

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The Tech Diplomacy Academy, which launched Tuesday, is an online platform centered on teaching its enrollees about the science and engineering behind emerging technology, how those technologies are being commercialized, and the foreign policy risks and opportunities for those innovations, Michelle Giuda, the CEO of the nonprofit and nonpartisan Krach Institute and former assistant secretary of state, told FedScoop. 

As the first adopter, the State Department will use that platform as an educational resource for its officials.

“The Krach Institute’s gift of educational licenses for their new Tech Diplomacy Academy will provide our public diplomacy and cyber and digital technology professionals access to cutting-edge training,” Elizabeth M. Allen, State’s undersecretary for public diplomacy, said in a written statement provided to FedScoop.

Allen underscored the importance of technology in global affairs, noting that “tech diplomacy is a central foreign policy priority” and that mastery of tech diplomacy “is critical for the State Department workforce to keep the United States on the leading edge.”

The establishment of the academy comes as understanding technology has become even more important in foreign affairs. Giuda said technological threats have only grown with things like generative AI, advanced semiconductors, 6G, and Iranian drones, and State Department leaders have highlighted the need to upskill diplomats.

“What we’re doing with the Tech Diplomacy Academy is empowering U.S. and allied government, business, tech, and then citizen leaders, so that they can compete and win in this rapidly changing technology landscape and rapidly changing and contested geopolitical landscape,” Giuda said.

Having the State Department as the first organization to adopt a new program is also something of a full-circle moment for the Krach Institute, which was founded by former State Department officials. 

The institute was co-founded in 2021 by Keith Krach, former chairman and CEO of Docusign and former undersecretary of state for economic growth, and Mung Chiang, now president of Purdue University and a former science and technology adviser to the secretary of state. 

While working at the State Department during the Trump administration, Giuda said that she, Krach and Chiang worked together to engineer the Clean Network, an alliance of countries and telecommunications companies, and in the process engineered new methods they called “tech diplomacy.”

“We’ve got this proven model now for how we work together with U.S. and allied governments, with corporations — not just in the U.S., but across all of those allied partners — in order to secure a critical tech sector, and so the founding of the Krach Institute was meant to continue that work,” Giuda said.

The Krach Institute’s “North Star” is to ensure that “technology advances freedom” and the Tech Diplomacy Academy advances that, she said.

The first curriculum the academy is offering is called the Tech Primer Series and focuses on fundamentals of critical emerging technologies, according to a release provided to FedScoop ahead of the announcement. 

Officials at the State Department using the new platform will be able to take the courses provided by the academy on demand as their busy schedules allow, Giuda said. Courses are roughly one hour long and are composed of 10 six-minute modules. The initial curriculum has about 20 courses, and upon completion, the enrollee will receive a certificate, Giuda said.

The No. 1 metric for the success of the program will be whether the academy is providing value and new information to U.S. diplomats, she said. 

While the State Department is the first, more partnerships within the government are part of the vision for the academy. Ultimately, Giuda said “the goal is for the entire USG to be learning on this platform.” 

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