The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) announced today the launch of the AI Safety Initiative in partnership with Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI. The Cloud Security Alliance helps shape defining protocols and standards, certifications, and best practices for enabling secure cloud computing environments. An existing coalition of subject matter experts also contributes to CSA and its efforts, with representation from international governments and the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
The announcement comes as increasing scrutiny is forming over government and private sector utilization of artificial intelligence, including generative AI. Calls for AI regulation are mounting daily, with Europe taking the lead.
The European Union has agreed to form the European Artificial Intelligence Act, an effort to introduce and enforce AI guardrails to adopt and use cutting-edge technology.
CSA specifically hopes to accomplish much of the same, but uniformly across the participating tech giants. Initial efforts will aim to help shape and influence guidelines for generative AI. Providing customers with safe and ethical access to generative AI technologies that can be utilized in compliant means is an initial objective.
Four AI Safety Initiative working groups have been formed with over 1,500 participants.
- AI Technology and Risk Working Group
- AI Governance & Compliance Working Group
- AI Controls Working Group
- AI Organizational Responsibilities Working Group
If you’re interested in participating in one of the working groups, the CSA encourages individuals to submit an inquiry.
Jen Easterly, Director of CISA commented on the AI Safety Initiative effort’s importance: “AI will be the most transformative technology of our lifetimes, bringing with it both tremendous promise and significant peril.
Easterly continued, “Through collaborative partnerships like this, we can collectively reduce the risk of these technologies being misused by taking the steps necessary to educate and instill best practices when managing the full lifecycle of AI capabilities, ensuring—most importantly—that they are designed, developed, and deployed to be safe and secure.”
Is it too late for AI regulation and safety frameworks?
Artificial intelligence is growing at a rapid pace, with tech giants racing to outdo each other with technological breakthroughs. OpenAI particularly aspires to achieve artificial general intelligence, a controversial but perhaps inevitable milestone. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman believes we may reach AGI as soon as 2030, and his firm hopes to be the company to achieve it first.
Companies and public sector entities globally are already adopting AI and generative AI despite it lacking compliance or best practice guidelines and standards. Instead, it has become one large experiment in the wild to see who can transform their company, organization, or workforce the most.
Efforts such as the CSA AI Safety Initiative hope to at least get businesses and public sector entities to pause and utilize AI within an agreed-upon framework that is vendor-agnostic.
As cybersecurity continues to evolve and face increased scrutiny and regulation, AI will undoubtedly follow the same path once shareholders, intellectual property, and legal exposure become contributing factors.
If you’d like to learn more about the CSA and the AI Safety Initiative, a virtual summit will be held on January 17-18.
