FDA-Style Oversight for AI Governance

If you’ve listened to some of the dialogue in hearings on Capitol Hill about how to regulate AI, you’ve heard various folks suggest the need for a regulatory agency to govern, in particular, general purpose AI systems that can be deployed across a wide range of applications. One existing agency is often mentioned as a potential model: the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). But how would applying the FDA work in practice? Where does the model break down when it comes to AI and related technologies, which are different in many ways from the types of things the FDA looks at day to day? To answer these questions, Justin Hendrix spoke to Merlin Stein and Connor Dunlop, the authors of a new report published by the Ada Lovelace Institute titled Safe before sale: Learnings from the FDA’s model of life sciences oversight for foundation models.