Program for responsible, safe and forward-looking research, best practices, education, professional credentialing and organizational certification for generative AI is underway
SEATTLE: The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), the world’s leading organization dedicated to defining standards, certifications, and best practices to help ensure a secure cloud computing environment, recently announced the launch of the AI Safety Initiative in partnership with Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI. This group is joined by a broad coalition of experts from the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), other governments, academia and across a wide swath of industries in what represents the largest number of participants in any initiative in CSA’s 14-year history.
The AI Safety Initiative is dedicated to crafting and openly sharing reliable guidelines for AI safety and security, initially concentrating on generative AI. It aims to equip customers, regardless of their size, with the tools, templates, and know-how for deploying AI in a safe, ethical, and compliant manner. By aligning with government regulations and adding agile industry standards, this initiative bridges the gap between policy and practice. The AI Safety Initiative is actively developing practical safeguards for today’s generative AI, structured in a way to help prepare for the future of much more powerful AI systems. Its goal is to reduce risks and amplify the positive impact of AI across all sectors.
“Generative AI is reshaping our world, offering immense promise but also immense risks. Uniting to share knowledge and best practices is crucial. The collaborative spirit of leaders crossing competitive boundaries to educate and implement best practices has enabled us to build the best recommendations for the industry,” said Caleb Sima, industry veteran and Chair of the Cloud Security Alliance AI Safety Initiative.
The AI Safety Initiative has begun meetings of its core research working groups:
- AI Technology and Risk Working Group
- AI Governance & Compliance Working Group
- AI Controls Working Group
- AI Organizational Responsibilities Working Group
The group has exceeded 1,500 expert participants; interested parties can inquire here.
The AI Safety Initiative will provide updates to its progress and host thought-leading speakers at two major upcoming events:
- The CSA Virtual AI Summit (January 17-18, 2024; online)
- The CSA AI Summit at the RSA Conference (May 6, 2024; San Francisco)
Additionally, CSA’s 110 chapters around the world are being mobilized to participate in the global activities and engage local AI stakeholders within their nation or region.
“AI will be the most transformative technology of our lifetimes, bringing with it both tremendous promise and significant peril,” said Jen Easterly, Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. “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.”
“Anthropic’s AI systems are designed to be helpful, honest, and harmless. We look forward to lending our expertise to crafting guidelines for safe and responsible AI systems for the wider industry. By collaborating on initiatives like this one focused on generative models today—with an eye toward more advanced AI down the line—we can ensure this transformative technology benefits all of society,” said Jason Clinton, Chief Security Officer, Anthropic.
“The CSA shares our belief that long-term generative AI advancements will be achieved when private organizations, government, and academia align around industry standards, as outlined in our Secure AI Framework (SAIF). Continued industry collaboration will help organizations ensure emerging AI technologies will have a major impact on the security ecosystem,” said Phil Venables, CISO at Google Cloud.
“Security is the foundation of trustworthy, safe, and responsible AI, and is core to OpenAI’s mission. We recognize the opportunity for new security frameworks and are glad to approach this in partnership,” said Matt Knight, Head of Security at OpenAI. “This coalition, and the guidelines emerging from it, will set standards that help ensure AI systems are built to be secure.”
