The State Department on Nov. 9 released its first-ever Enterprise AI Strategy covering fiscal years 2024-25 and highlighting how the agency aims to empower diplomacy through responsible AI technology.
The document establishes a centralized vision for AI innovation, infrastructure, policy, governance, and culture by inaugurating department-wide guidance for the responsible and ethical design, development, acquisition, and appropriate application of AI, the agency said.
“The Department of State stands at a critical juncture where an emerging ecosystem of AI capabilities presents enormous opportunity,” the agency wrote. “This opportunity can allow the Department to leverage AI to achieve breakthroughs of all kinds – in public diplomacy, language translation, management operations, information proliferation and dissemination, task automation, code generation, and others.”
“However, this opportunity will require the Department to take steps to ensure ethical and responsible use. This includes steps to protect the security and privacy of Department data and to avert biased outcomes that pose a risk to our mission and our values,” it added.
The strategy outlines four goals that serve as foundational targets to enhance the department’s AI capabilities: leveraging secure AI infrastructure; fostering a culture that embraces AI technology; ensuring AI is applied responsibly; and innovating.
“Each Goal rests on specific objectives that encompass priorities identified by the Department’s AI leaders,” the document reads. “These relevant and achievable efforts will enable measurable advancement over the next two years.”
During a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing this week, two top officials from the State Department highlighted the new AI strategy, as well as the need to leverage new and innovative technologies to modernize diplomacy.
“Secretary [of State Antony] Blinken believes that our workforce is more equipped to lead globally when provided with timely, relevant data,” Matthew Graviss, the department’s chief data and artificial intelligence officer and leader of the new AI strategy, said during the Nov. 15 hearing. “AI enhances data’s power unlocking our workforce’s utmost potential. We are committed to harnessing AI’s potential, and we’re committed to doing it in a manner that is safe, secure, and trustworthy.”
Nathaniel Fick, the State Department’s ambassador at-large for the Bureau for Cyberspace and Digital Policy, warned that the United States must figure out its own AI governance before it can lead the rest of the world.
“Innovation is increasingly a foundational source of our geopolitical power,” Fick said. “Put simply in geopolitical competition terms: tech is increasingly the game. It’s revolutionary, it’s accelerating, and the United States must lead, engaging boldly on behalf of our values and our interests.”
“The foreign policy in any transparent democratic society is a reflection of what we do at home,” Fick said. “We do need to get our own house in order in respect to the regulation and governance of these emerging technologies so that we are presenting on the world stage a responsible framework for governance that has legitimacy and moral authority.”
