Capito’s bipartisan bill aims to strengthen AI standards and grow trust

U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) recently reintroduced bipartisan legislation that would facilitate the development and deployment of AI by creating guidelines for third-party evaluators who work with AI companies on safety testing their systems.

AI companies currently claim they train, conduct safety red-team exercises, and carry out risk management on their AI models, but in fact often do so without any independent verification.

To rectify that, Sen. Capito joined with U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-CO) to reintroduce the Validation and Evaluation for Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (VET AI) Act, S. 2615, on July 31.

The bill would direct the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in coordination with the U.S. Department of Energy and National Science Foundation, to work with stakeholders in industry and academia to develop specifications, guidelines, and recommendations for third-party evaluators to work with AI companies and provide independent evaluations of how their AI systems are developed and tested.

Developing the guidelines would include considerations for data privacy protections, mitigations against potential harms to individuals from an AI system, dataset quality, and governance and communications processes of a developer or deployer throughout the AI systems’ development lifecycles, according to a summary of the bill.

“The VET AI Act is a commonsense bill that will allow for a voluntary set of guidelines for AI, which will only help the development of systems that choose to adopt them,” Sen. Capito said.

In addition, the bill would create an Advisory Committee to review and recommend criteria for individuals or organizations seeking to obtain certification of their ability to conduct internal or external assurance for AI systems, the bill summary said.

The bill had passed out of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee during the last Congress but was not enacted into law.

“I was proud to join Senator Hickenlooper in reintroducing this legislation, and I look forward to getting this bill passed out of the Commerce Committee soon,” Sen. Capito said.