Officials from the United States and the United Kingdom have signed a declaration to establish a government-to-government dialogue on artificial intelligence (AI) and further cooperation in AI research and development (R&D).
The Sept. 25 joint statement was signed by: U.S. CTO Michael Kratsios, of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP); and the U.K. and Northern Ireland’s Secretary of State Alok Sharma in the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy; and Oliver Dowden, secretary of state in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport.
To build on a U.S.-U.K. Science and Technology Agreement signed in 2017, the declaration lists the following as steps:
- “Taking stock of and utilizing existing bilateral science and technology cooperation (e.g., the Memorandum of Understanding between the U.S. National Science Foundation and U.K. Research and Innovation on Research Cooperation) and multilateral cooperation frameworks”;
- “Recommending priorities for future cooperation, particularly in R&D areas where each partner shares strong common interest (e.g., interdisciplinary research and intelligent systems) and brings complementary challenges, regulatory or cultural considerations, or expertise to the partnerships”;
- “Coordinating as appropriate the planning and programming of relevant activities in these areas, including promoting researcher and student collaboration that could potentially involve national partners, the private sector, academia, and the scientific community to further our efforts by harnessing the value of public-private partnerships”; and
- “Promoting research and development in AI, focusing on challenging technical issues, and protecting against efforts to adopt and apply these technologies in the service of authoritarianism and repression.”
The declaration came out of the second Special Relationship Economic Working Group, a meeting held at the White House for the two countries last week.
“The long-standing special relationship between our two countries is crucial – now more than ever,” said the U.K.’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak, in a release. “We must continue building on our enduring economic partnership to secure a strong and sustainable economic recovery from this crisis, at home and abroad.”
The U.K. and U.S. were also two of the 13 countries to discuss AI ethical principles for defense at the first-ever “Partnership for Defense” in mid-September.
