The Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) joined Mozilla and nearly fifty civil society organizations and scholars in a letter to U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, urging her to protect openness and transparency in AI.  The joint letter is in response to a public consultation process run by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) at the Department of Commerce, to examine the risks, benefits, and potential policy approaches related to open models for AI.  

The letter highlights the many clear benefits of an open ecosystem of AI models, analogizing to the similar benefits–to competition, innovation, security, and transparency– that open source software has delivered over the past thirty years.  It further notes that there is still a dearth of clear evidence that such open models pose a significantly different risk compared to that posed by closed models or by access to the internet itself.  Therefore, the letter concludes, the Administration should avoid broad, heavy-handed restrictions on the publication of such models in favor of more tailored applications of specific laws to specific harms.