Created to provide a snapshot of the tremendous momentum generated over the past 18 months, this infographic captures Secure AI milestones that are helping drive the market forward.
Artificial Intelligence is unquestionably having its moment in the spotlight. AI has existed for decades, but the public release of Generative AI tools in late 2022 sparked global interest and ignited a discussion around guidelines and policy that continues today. During the last 18 months, there has been a surge of notable activity and milestones related to the development, adoption, and regulation of AI. These global efforts highlight the critical importance of the safety, security, and trustworthiness of AI systems.
At its core, Secure AI is about minimizing risk and enabling trust and security while enhancing decision making, protecting privacy, and combating broader legal, societal, and national security risks. To deliver the best outcomes, AI/ML capabilities need to be trained and enriched using a broad, diverse range of data sources. Foundational to these efforts are Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs), a family of technologies that are uniquely equipped to enable, enhance, and preserve the privacy of data throughout its lifecycle, allowing users to capitalize on the power of AI while mitigating risk and prioritizing protection.
Recognizing the transformative progress taking place around the world, we put together this Secure AI milestone infographic to help track and highlight the policies, reports, and regulatory actions that are shaping global outcomes. While this represents only a portion of the activity taking place, we believe these actions showcase the urgency and momentum we see taking hold across the Secure AI landscape. Below the graphic, you’ll find links to each milestone — we encourage you to take time to explore this important progress at a deeper level.
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Secure AI Milestones
In January 2023, under direction from Congress, NIST developed the Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework to help organizations incorporate trustworthiness into the design, development, use, and evaluation of AI products, services, and systems.
“AI systems can also present new risks to privacy by allowing inference to identify individuals or previously private information about individuals. Privacy-enhancing technologies (“PETs”) for AI, as well as data minimizing methods such as de-identification and aggregation for certain model outputs, can support design for privacy-enhanced AI systems.”
Organizations should “Implement appropriate data input measures and protections for personal data and intellectual property…which could include privacy-preserving training techniques.”
“Agencies shall use available policy and technical tools, including privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) where appropriate, to protect privacy.”
The NCSC Guidelines for Secure AI System Development, released in November 2023, identified security as a core requirement, not just in the development phase, but throughout the life cycle of the system and identifies PETs as a means of mitigating risk to AI systems.
“Privacy-enhancing technologies (such as differential privacy or homomorphic encryption) can be used to explore or assure levels of risk associated with consumers, users and attackers having access to models and outputs.”
The Bletchley Declaration, signed by global leaders representing 28 countries during the gathering of the AI Safety Summit in November 2023, notes the importance of trustworthy and responsible AI that accounts for privacy and data protection.
“We affirm that, for the good of all, AI should be designed, developed, deployed, and used, in a manner that is safe, in such a way as to be human-centric, trustworthy and responsible.”
In February 2024, the U.S. Government created the NIST AI Safety Institute Consortium in support of the development and deployment of safe and trustworthy AI, bringing together leaders from industry, civil society, and academia to set safety standards and protect the innovation ecosystem.
“The U.S. government has a significant role to play in setting the standards and developing the tools we need to mitigate the risks and harness the immense potential of artificial intelligence. President Biden directed us to pull every lever to accomplish two key goals: set safety standards and protect our innovation ecosystem.”
The European Union approved the EU Artificial Intelligence Act in March 2024, marking the world’s first major set of regulatory ground rules to govern artificial intelligence, which dictates that the right to privacy and to protection of personal data must be guaranteed throughout the entire lifecycle of the AI system.
“The right to privacy and to protection of personal data must be guaranteed throughout the entire lifecycle of the AI system. Measures taken by providers to ensure compliance with those principles may include not only anonymisation and encryption, but also the use of technology that permits algorithms to be brought to the data and allows training of AI systems without the transmission between parties or copying of the raw or structured data themselves.”
Also in March 2024, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a U.S.-led resolution on AI, the first ever standalone resolution to establish a global consensus approach to AI governance, encouraging member states to promote safe, secure, and trustworthy AI systems worldwide.
“Safe, secure and trustworthy artificial intelligence systems – which refers to artificial intelligence systems in the non-military domain, which are human-centric, reliable, explainable, privacy preserving, and responsible – have the potential to accelerate and enable progress towards the achievement of all 17 Sustainable Development Goals and sustainable development.”
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) updated its AI Principles in May 2024 to guide AI actors in their efforts to develop trustworthy AI, which requires trust in all aspects of personal data collection, management and use, such as acquiring reliable data, using it responsibly, keeping it secured, and maintaining transparency about its use.
“AI actors should apply a systematic risk management approach to each phase of the AI system lifecycle on an ongoing basis. Risks include those related to harmful bias, human rights including safety, security, and privacy, as well as labour and intellectual property rights.”
Later in May 2024, the Roadmap for AI Policy in the United States Senate identified areas of consensus that merit bipartisan consideration to harness the full potential of AI while prioritizing responsible innovation, which includes foundational trustworthy AI topics, such as transparency, explainability, privacy, interoperability, and security.
“The AI Working Group encourages policy mechanisms to reduce the prevalence of non-public personal information being stored in, or used by, AI systems, including providing appropriate incentives for research and development of privacy-enhancing technologies.”
Conclusion
While the last 18 months have been significant in shaping the global approach to Secure AI, we’re not done yet. The opportunity for leadership in the AI space remains immense, and our team at Enveil is proud to play a role in supporting these initiatives by delivering PETs-powered software solutions that advance Secure AI efforts in the commercial and public sector markets.
Powered by technology breakthroughs and informed by experience, Enveil exemplifies how PETs can be used to enable the secure usage of disparate, decentralized datasets for AI/ML applications. Organizations can securely enrich existing ML models by expanding the pool of available data sources for training and deployment. Encrypted models can be leveraged across jurisdictional, third-party, and organizational boundaries, even when using highly sensitive or proprietary models, allowing organizations to securely and privately derive insights and improve outcomes. By securing the usage of data, Enveil allows users to capitalize on the power of AI while mitigating risks and prioritizing protection.
Contact our team to learn how the power of Privacy Enhancing Technologies can help your organization take advantage of this AI momentum in a way that is secure, compliant, trustworthy, and sustainable.
Enveil is a pioneering Privacy Enhancing Technology company protecting Data in Use. Enveil’s business-enabling and privacy-preserving capabilities change the paradigm of how and where organizations can leverage data to unlock value. Defining the transformative category of Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs), Enveil’s award-winning ZeroReveal® solutions for secure data usage, collaboration, monetization, and Secure AI protect the content of the search, analytic, or model while it's being used or processed. Customers can extract insights, cross-match, search, analyze, and leverage AI across boundaries and silos at scale without exposing their interests and intent or compromising the security or ownership of the underlying data. A World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer and Gartner Cool Vendor, Enveil is deployed and operational today, revolutionizing data usage in the global marketplace.
