Defining Key Terms in the Presidential Order on AI Governance

Section 3 - Definitions.

For purposes of this order:

 (a)  The term “agency” means each agency described in 44 U.S.C. 3502(1), except for the independent regulatory agencies described in 44 U.S.C. 3502(5).

     (b)  The term “artificial intelligence” or “AI” has the meaning set forth in 15 U.S.C. 9401(3):  a machine-based system that can, for a given set of human-defined objectives, make predictions, recommendations, or decisions influencing real or virtual environments.  Artificial intelligence systems use machine- and human-based inputs to perceive real and virtual environments; abstract such perceptions into models through analysis in an automated manner; and use model inference to formulate options for information or action.

     (c)  The term “AI model” means a component of an information system that implements AI technology and uses computational, statistical, or machine-learning techniques to produce outputs from a given set of inputs.

     (d)  The term “AI red-teaming” means a structured testing effort to find flaws and vulnerabilities in an AI system, often in a controlled environment and in collaboration with developers of AI.  Artificial Intelligence red-teaming is most often performed by dedicated “red teams” that adopt adversarial methods to identify flaws and vulnerabilities, such as harmful or discriminatory outputs from an AI system, unforeseen or undesirable system behaviors, limitations, or potential risks associated with the misuse of the system.

     (e)  The term “AI system” means any data system, software, hardware, application, tool, or utility that operates in whole or in part using AI.

     (f)  The term “commercially available information” means any information or data about an individual or group of individuals, including an individual’s or group of individuals’ device or location, that is made available or obtainable and sold, leased, or licensed to the general public or to governmental or non-governmental entities.

     (g)  The term “crime forecasting” means the use of analytical techniques to attempt to predict future crimes or crime-related information.  It can include machine-generated predictions that use algorithms to analyze large volumes of data, as well as other forecasts that are generated without machines and based on statistics, such as historical crime statistics.

     (h)  The term “critical and emerging technologies” means those technologies listed in the February 2022 Critical and Emerging Technologies List Update issued by the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), as amended by subsequent updates to the list issued by the NSTC.

     (i)  The term “critical infrastructure” has the meaning set forth in section 1016(e) of the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001, 42 U.S.C. 5195c(e).

     (j)  The term “differential-privacy guarantee” means protections that allow information about a group to be shared while provably limiting the improper access, use, or disclosure of personal information about particular entities.

     (k)  The term “dual-use foundation model” means an AI model that is trained on broad data; generally uses self-supervision; contains at least tens of billions of parameters; is applicable across a wide range of contexts; and that exhibits, or could be easily modified to exhibit, high levels of performance at tasks that pose a serious risk to security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination of those matters, such as by:

          (i)    substantially lowering the barrier of entry for non-experts to design, synthesize, acquire, or use chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) weapons;

          (ii)   enabling powerful offensive cyber operations through automated vulnerability discovery and exploitation against a wide range of potential targets of cyber attacks; or

          (iii)  permitting the evasion of human control or oversight through means of deception or obfuscation.

Models meet this definition even if they are provided to end users with technical safeguards that attempt to prevent users from taking advantage of the relevant unsafe capabilities.

     (l)  The term “Federal law enforcement agency” has the meaning set forth in section 21(a) of Executive Order 14074 of May 25, 2022 (Advancing Effective, Accountable Policing and Criminal Justice Practices To Enhance Public Trust and Public Safety).

     (m)  The term “floating-point operation” means any mathematical operation or assignment involving floating-point numbers, which are a subset of the real numbers typically represented on computers by an integer of fixed precision scaled by an integer exponent of a fixed base.

     (n)  The term “foreign person” has the meaning set forth in section 5(c) of Executive Order 13984 of January 19, 2021 (Taking Additional Steps To Address the National Emergency With Respect to Significant Malicious Cyber-Enabled Activities).

     (o)  The terms “foreign reseller” and “foreign reseller of United States Infrastructure as a Service Products” mean a foreign person who has established an Infrastructure as a Service Account to provide Infrastructure as a Service Products subsequently, in whole or in part, to a third party.

     (p)  The term “generative AI” means the class of AI models that emulate the structure and characteristics of input data in order to generate derived synthetic content.  This can include images, videos, audio, text, and other digital content.

     (q)  The terms “Infrastructure as a Service Product,” “United States Infrastructure as a Service Product,” “United States Infrastructure as a Service Provider,” and “Infrastructure as a Service Account” each have the respective meanings given to those terms in section 5 of Executive Order 13984.

     (r)  The term “integer operation” means any mathematical operation or assignment involving only integers, or whole numbers expressed without a decimal point.

     (s)  The term “Intelligence Community” has the meaning given to that term in section 3.5(h) of Executive Order 12333 of December 4, 1981 (United States Intelligence Activities), as amended.

     (t)  The term “machine learning” means a set of techniques that can be used to train AI algorithms to improve performance at a task based on data.

     (u)  The term “model weight” means a numerical parameter within an AI model that helps determine the model’s outputs in response to inputs.

     (v)  The term “national security system” has the meaning set forth in 44 U.S.C. 3552(b)(6).

     (w)  The term “omics” means biomolecules, including nucleic acids, proteins, and metabolites, that make up a cell or cellular system.

     (x)  The term “Open RAN” means the Open Radio Access Network approach to telecommunications-network standardization adopted by the O-RAN Alliance, Third Generation Partnership Project, or any similar set of published open standards for multi-vendor network equipment interoperability.

     (y)  The term “personally identifiable information” has the meaning set forth in Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Circular No. A-130.

     (z)  The term “privacy-enhancing technology” means any software or hardware solution, technical process, technique, or other technological means of mitigating privacy risks arising from data processing, including by enhancing predictability, manageability, disassociability, storage, security, and confidentiality.  These technological means may include secure multiparty computation, homomorphic encryption, zero-knowledge proofs, federated learning, secure enclaves, differential privacy, and synthetic-data-generation tools.  This is also sometimes referred to as “privacy-preserving technology.”

     (aa)  The term “privacy impact assessment” has the meaning set forth in OMB Circular No. A-130.

     (bb)  The term “Sector Risk Management Agency” has the meaning set forth in 6 U.S.C. 650(23).

     (cc)  The term “self-healing network” means a telecommunications network that automatically diagnoses and addresses network issues to permit self-restoration.

     (dd)  The term “synthetic biology” means a field of science that involves redesigning organisms, or the biomolecules of organisms, at the genetic level to give them new characteristics.  Synthetic nucleic acids are a type of biomolecule redesigned through synthetic-biology methods.

     (ee)  The term “synthetic content” means information, such as images, videos, audio clips, and text, that has been significantly modified or generated by algorithms, including by AI.

     (ff)  The term “testbed” means a facility or mechanism equipped for conducting rigorous, transparent, and replicable testing of tools and technologies, including AI and PETs, to help evaluate the functionality, usability, and performance of those tools or technologies.

     (gg)  The term “watermarking” means the act of embedding information, which is typically difficult to remove, into outputs created by AI — including into outputs such as photos, videos, audio clips, or text — for the purposes of verifying the authenticity of the output or the identity or characteristics of its provenance, modifications, or conveyance.