Reinforces Need for Congressional Action on Comprehensive Framework
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Responding to today’s White House Executive Order (EO) “Promoting Advanced Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Security” establishing:
- A process to strengthen the cybersecurity and defence of government systems against AI threats to protect national security, and
- A voluntary process for developers of covered frontier AI models to coordinate with the federal government prior to broader deployment
The Association for Competitive Technology (ACT) acknowledges that the EO tries to prevent its voluntary AI model review mechanism from becoming a mandatory one. We hope the framework remains voluntary as intended.
“We appreciate that this order is a departure from the proposals to explicitly mandate premarket review of frontier models. An FDA-style pre-market review process for foundation models would be unworkable, duplicative, and especially harmful for the startups and small businesses building useful AI tools on top of those models,” said Morgan Reed, president of the Association for Competitive Technology (ACT). “We need a comprehensive federal AI framework that establishes a single, clear set of rules to avoid having to deal with potentially 50 separate sets of rules. This constant punting on the hard questions is disastrous for U.S. startups or future startups that could have the next great innovation but are instead ensnared in a tangled web of AI policies.”
We hope that this EO will help avoid the risk of perpetuating a challenging dynamic where policy is made with the big players in mind and no consideration for the downstream effects on small businesses that are the foundation of the U.S. economy.
The Executive Branch must remain faithful to the commitment to making this a voluntary system. A voluntary framework can still become a de facto gatekeeping process if participation becomes expected for leading model developers, critical-infrastructure deployments, federal procurement, or access to trusted partner channels. Cybersecurity and national security risks are real, but they should be addressed at the right layer of the technology stack and without thickening the policy fog for startups.
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About the Association for Competitive Technology (ACT)
ACT is a global technology trade association representing startups and small technology businesses. We work directly with our members worldwide to advocate for a policy environment that takes into account their real-world challenges and supports innovation, access to capital, job creation, and the ability of small technology companies to grow and compete globally.