The following statement can be attributed to Paul Lekas, Senior Vice President, Global Public Policy, the Software & Information Industry Association.
The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) congratulates the Department of State, SIIA member companies Amazon, Google, and Meta, and other leading AI companies, for their vision in launching the Partnership for Global Inclusivity. The Partnership represents a new form of public-private partnership focused on fostering AI innovation in developing countries, safely, by focusing on core AI infrastructure: compute, capacity, and context. We commend the Partnership for collectively leveraging hundreds of millions of dollars in resources, including $120 million from Google to support AI education and training.
SIIA believes it is critical for AI to be implemented fairly and safely around the world and that all countries should be provided access to this technology. The commitment from the leading AI companies and the Department of State to help close the access gap is a great first step.
We also commend the forty member countries of the Freedom Online Coalition (FOC) for endorsing foundational principles and practices for responsible public sector adoption and use of AI technologies. The joint statement reflects a growing consensus in support of a risk-based AI framework aligned with democratic values, including respect of international obligations and commitments; pre-deployment impact assessments of AI systems in high-risk contexts; ongoing monitoring of AI systems in high-impact contexts; training; public transparency; accountability; and leveraging public sector procurement to incentivize safety, security, and trustworthiness standards.
Lastly, we applaud the U.S. government’s release of the Global AI Research Agenda and the AI in Global Development Playbook. These will help to implement the goals of the Partnership and additional efforts to ensure the promise of AI reaches all nations.
