In support of President Donald Trump’s American AI Initiative, the Department of Defense has nearly tripled its AI-related budget request for Fiscal 2020. But questions remain if the money to be spent is really going into AI-related research.
Chris Cornillie filed this report in Bloomberg Government:
The Pentagon’s $4 billion budget request for AI-related R&D represents significant growth from last year. A search of the Pentagon’s fiscal 2019 RDT&E budget request using the same keywords and parameters identified only 123 budget activities valued at $1.4 billion.
There appear to be only two possible explanations for why the Pentagon’s budget for AI-related R&D could effectively triple over the course of a single fiscal year. The first is that the Pentagon realistically recognizes the risk of falling behind rival nations in AI development and is pouring resources into catching up. Then-Defense Secretary James Mattis reportedly sent President Donald Trump a memo in May 2018 urging him to develop a national AI strategy to protect the U.S. from losing its technological edge.
Subsequently, both the White House and the Pentagon released AI strategies, the Pentagon launched the JAIC, and DARPA announced a five-year, $2 billion AI Next initiative. But these programs can hardly account for that type of growth.
A second possibility is that Pentagon officials have exaggerated their programs’ participation in AI-related research, or rebranded existing projects as AI projects, in an effort to tap into the government wide mandate for AI funding — or “AI-washing.”
One way to test whether an agency is AI-washing its budget is to identify budget activities that weren’t designated as AI-related in previous years, but are in fiscal 2020. Of the 254 unique AI-related activities carried over from fiscal 2019 (346 total minus 92 new activities in 2020), Bloomberg Government counted more than 70 that had no recognizable AI component in the fiscal 2019 budget request, but nevertheless added AI-related descriptors in 2020.
