Former Google head and federal AI advisor calls for nonpublic model evaluations at NIST variant

The government should establish a venue akin to the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s AI Safety Institute for testing artificial intelligence models in a classified setting, Eric Schmidt told lawmakers during a hearing on the future of the technology that largely focused on a need to counter China’s advances in the field.

“The first thing the government needs to do is to make sure the government understands, at the secret and top-secret level, what China is actually doing,” Schmidt...