The White House released Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence on October 12, 2016, alongside a separate strategic plan for federally funded AI research and development. The announcement described the report as a survey of the technology and its policy implications, with recommendations for further action. Those recommendations should not be read as evidence that agencies had already carried them out. [ai-release]

One useful example is Recommendation 5. It asked agencies setting policy for AI-enabled products to involve technical expertise at senior level. The report described a collaboration among agency leaders, staff familiar with regulation and specialists who understand AI. Leadership should recruit the necessary talent or identify it among existing employees and include that expertise in policy discussions. [ai-report]

That is advice about how regulatory decisions should be made. It does not, by itself, show that a particular product has received approval or that a new rule has taken effect. Similarly, Recommendation 2 proposed prioritizing open training data and data standards, with a possible government data initiative. A possible initiative is not a record of datasets actually released through it. [ai-report]

For readers tracking policy, the next evidence would therefore be agency actions matching those recommendations: staffing decisions, regulatory documents or identifiable data releases. This retrospective establishes the report’s publication and proposed direction, not those later results. The release and report are complementary primary documents from the same administration, rather than two independent confirmations that the agenda worked. [ai-release][ai-report]

Source documents

  1. The Administration’s Report on the Future of Artificial Intelligencehttps://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2016/10/12/administrations-report-future-artificial-intelligence
  2. Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligencehttps://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/whitehouse_files/microsites/ostp/NSTC/preparing_for_the_future_of_ai.pdf