Openness in Artificial Intelligence Models

In the United States, the approach to governing artificial intelligence (AI) is still in its early stages. As policymakers, developers, and civil society work together to navigate an uncertain digital future, encouraging greater openness in the AI model ecosystem will be critical to upholding democratic values, serving the public interest, and promoting innovation. There are five essential aspects of openness that span both technical and non-technical features of models: (1) open code that can be modified, (2) open licenses that enable third-party use, (3) transparency about model inputs, (4) transparency about possible model misuse, and (5) open standards for interconnection among AI models. Promoting these five attributes of openness can create the kind of AI ecosystem that better serves public transparency and democratic accountability, innovation and competition, education and research, and security. We explore the relationship between open AI models and each of these benefits and recommend steps that policymakers, researchers, AI companies, developers, and civil society organizations should take.