Sam Altman, Jensen Huang, and the 20 other leaders on the new AI safety board

The AI board will advise the Department of Homeland Security on safely and securely deploying AI in critical infrastructure

By Britney Nguyen3 min readUpdated April 26, 2024

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The people responsible for driving the current artificial intelligence boom are now being tasked with advising the U.S. government on how to safely and securely deploy the technology in critical infrastructure.

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and Nvidia $NVDA chief executive Jensen Huang are among almost two dozen tech and business leaders, academics, public officials, and civil rights leaders joining the government’s Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security Board. The board members will advise the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on preventing harm while implementing AI in critical infrastructure such as the power grid and transportation. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas will chair the board.

See below for the other inaugural members of the new AI safety board.

Tech

As mentioned above, Altman, whose ChatGPT launched the fierce, ongoing generative AI race, and Huang, whose company designs the chips powering leading AI models, will serve on the board with other tech executives including AI startup Anthropic’s co-founder and chief executive Dario Amodei, Microsoft $MSFT chief executive and chairman Satya Nadella, and Alphabet $GOOGL chief executive Sundar Pichai. Among the others:

Rumman Chowdhury, chief executive of Humane-Intelligence, a non-profit that works with companies developing consumer-facing AI products to review their models for safety and ethics
Arvind Krishna, chair and chief executive of technology pioneer IBM $IBM
Lisa Su, chair and chief executive of chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD $AMD)
Adam Selipsky, chief executive of Amazon $AMZN Web Services (AWS), which provides Bedrock, a cloud-based service where tens of thousands of companies are building and scaling generative AI applications
Shantanu Narayen, chair and chief executive of Adobe $ADBE
Chuck Robbins, chair and chief executive of Cisco $CSCO, and chair of the Business Roundtable, a non-profit lobbyist association consisting of chief executive officers in the U.S.

Business

The Biden administration also sought board members whose companies are implementing AI-powered technology into their business, including Delta Air Lines chief executive Ed Bastian. Others include:

Kathy Warden, chair, president, and chief executive of aerospace and military technology company Northrop Grumman $NOC, which has developed and implemented AI and machine learning (ML) solutions into its aerospace systems it says “are essential to our national security”
Vicki Hollub, president and chief executive of Occidental $OXY Petroleum, an oil and gas exploration and manufacturing company

Public office

Arati Prabhakar, director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), and assistant to President Joe Biden for science and technology
Bruce Harrell, Mayor of Seattle, and chair of the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ Technology and Innovation Committee
Wes Moore, Governor of Maryland

Academia

Fei-Fei Li, an AI researcher, co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Institute, former director of Stanford’s AI Lab, former vice president and chief scientist of AI/ML at Google and Google Cloud, and co-founder and chair of non-profit AI4ALL
Nicol Turner Lee, senior fellow and director at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Technology Innovation, which conducts research on technology development in the U.S. and around the world

Civil rights

Alexandra Reeve Givens, president and chief executive of the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), which aims to “advance civil rights and civil liberties in the digital age”
Damon Hewitt, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a non-partisan, non-profit organization that uses legal advocacy to fight for racial justice inside and outside of the court system
Maya Wiley, president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which includes the Center for Civil Rights and Technology that conducts research and advocacy to include civil rights protections in AI policy

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