National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Act of 2020

Short title— This Act may be cited as the “National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Act of 2020”.

Table of contents— The table of contents for this Act is as follows:

Artificial intelligence is a tool that has the potential to change and possibly transform every sector of the United States economy and society.

The Federal Government should continue to play an important role advancing research, development, standards, and education activities in artificial intelligence through coordination and collaboration between government, academia, and the private sector to leverage the intellectual, physical, and digital resources of each stakeholder.

The Federal Government lacks clear understanding of the capabilities of artificial intelligence and its potential to affect various social and economic sectors, including ethical concerns, national security implications, and workforce impacts.

Researchers from academia, Federal laboratories, and much of the private sector have limited access to many high-quality datasets, computing resources, or real-world testing environments to design and deploy safe and trustworthy artificial intelligence systems.

There is a lack of standards and benchmarking for artificial intelligence systems that academia and the public and private sectors can use to evaluate the performance of these systems before and after deployment.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly becoming a highly interdisciplinary field with expertise required from a diverse range of scientific and other scholarly disciplines that traditionally work independently and continue to face cultural and institutional barriers to large scale collaboration.

Current Federal investments and funding mechanisms are largely insufficient to incentivize and support the large-scale interdisciplinary and public-private collaborations that will be required to advance trustworthy artificial intelligence systems in the United States.

The United States education pipeline for artificial intelligence fields faces significant challenges. Not only does the artificial intelligence research field lack the gender and racial diversity of the American population as a whole, but it is failing to both retain researchers and adequately support educators to meet the demands of the next generation of students studying artificial intelligence.

In order to help drive forward advances in trustworthy artificial intelligence across all sectors and to the benefit of all Americans, the Federal Government must provide sufficient resources and use its convening power to facilitate the growth of artificial intelligence human capital, research, and innovation capacity in academia and other nonprofit research organizations, companies of all sizes and across all sectors, and within the Federal Government.

Advisory Committee— The term Advisory Committee means the National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee established under section 104(a).

Agency head— The term agency head means the head of any Executive agency (as defined in section 105 of title 5, United States Code) other than the Department of Defense.

Artificial intelligence— The term artificial intelligence means a machine-based system that can, for a given set of human-defined objectives, make predictions, recommendations or decisions influencing real or virtual environments. Artificial intelligence systems use machine and human-based inputs to—

Initiative— The term Initiative means the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative established under section 101(a).

Initiative Office— The term Initiative Office means the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Office established under section 102(a).

Institute— The term Institute means an Artificial Intelligence Research Institute described in section 201(b)(1).

Interagency Committee— The term Interagency Committee means the interagency committee established under section 103(a).

K-12 education— The term K-12 education means elementary school and secondary education, as such terms are defined in section 8101 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (20 U.S.C. 7801).

Machine learning— The term machine learning means an application of artificial intelligence that is characterized by providing systems the ability to automatically learn and improve on the basis of data or experience, without being explicitly programmed.