Biden’s AI Standards Team: Five Officials You Need to Know

A team of lawyers, engineers, and national security specialists are leading the Commerce Department’s push to craft guardrails for training and deploying artificial intelligence in a broad swath of industries.

President Joe Biden tasked the team last October with developing techniques to identify AI-generated images, determining what data should be used to train algorithms, and preventing China from accessing the building blocks of the technology. They’re also working with foreign governments and Congress to coordinate their approaches to AI.

The results of their work are meant to serve as a model for US companies, state and local governments, and federal agencies as they deploy AI to speed up customer interactions, hire employees, and screen applicants for government benefits, among other tasks.

Here are five key players carrying out Biden’s executive order on AI:

Laurie E. Locascio

Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology

Photo: B. Hayes/NIST

Locascio sets the scientific priorities for the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology, the federal laboratory that develops, tests, and endorses standards for a broad array of technologies. In addition to overseeing the institute’s AI research, she also supervises scientists studying biotechnology, quantum science, and cybersecurity.

Locascio asked a House panel in May for an additional $50 million to finish the responsibilities assigned to the institute in Biden’s AI executive order. This is Locascio’s second stint at NIST, having worked at the institute for 31 years before leaving for a research post at the University of Maryland. Locascio, a biomedical engineer, holds 12 patents related to bioengineering.

Alan Estevez

Under Secretary of Commerce for Industry and Security

Photographer: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Estevez is responsible for blocking America’s adversaries, particularly China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, from obtaining the semiconductor technology necessary to train AI systems. His team over the last two years has imposed restrictions on the sale to China of advanced computer chips and the equipment needed to manufacture them. He’s also pushing US allies in Europe and Asia to do the same, including Japan and the Netherlands.

Estevez spent 36 years at the Department of Defense, including a stint overseeing the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s research and development arm. His team, as part of Biden’s executive order on AI, is charged with monitoring US AI developers and how they’re designing advanced AI models.

Elizabeth Kelly

Director of the AI Safety Institute

Photographer: Ting Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Kelly heads the AI Safety Institute, the team at the National Institute of Standards and Technology tasked with developing the AI tests, definitions, and voluntary standards ordered by Biden in his October directive on the technology.

More than 200 companies, civil society groups, and researchers have agreed to share data and technology with Kelly’s team. She separately represented the US at an AI summit in South Korea in May, where 10 countries plus the European Union agreed to share information about AI models, including capabilities and risks.

A former economic policy adviser to Biden, Kelly helped craft his AI executive order. Kelly is a lawyer who previously worked at Capital One Financial Corp. and served in the Obama White House.

Elham Tabassi

Chief Technology Officer of the AI Safety Institute

Photo: National Institute of Standards and Technology

Tabassi, trained in electrical engineering, is the top scientist at the AI Safety Institute. She has been experimenting with machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence, since she joined the National Institute of Standards and Technology in 1999.

Tabassi helped write the institute’s voluntary guidelines for companies to identify risks posed by AI, such as the possibility that algorithms will produce inaccurate information or fall victim to cyber attacks. She’s leading a team of scientists digging for flaws in others’ AI systems and setting up facilities to test the most powerful models.

Saif M. Khan

Senior Adviser to the Secretary for Critical and Emerging Technologies

Photo: University of Maryland Applied Research Lab for Intelligence and Security

Khan helps coordinate AI policy activities across the Commerce Department, including the development of scientific standards, AI-related export controls, and copyright guidance for AI-assisted inventions.

Khan worked on emerging technology issues at the National Security Council before joining the Commerce Department in 2023. He has been a key liaison between the department and Congress on its AI actions.

Prior to serving in the Biden administration, Khan spent a decade as an intellectual property attorney, including a stint at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.