By Heidi Wood
Vice President, Chief Digital and Transformation Officer, L3Harris
With artificial intelligence evolving at an exponential pace and permeating nearly every aspect of our economy and daily life, regulators and industry leaders are debating what, if any, guardrails should be placed on it – particularly foreign AI models that could pose security and economic risks to the United States. While the concerns driving these discussions are legitimate, the conversation needs to be reoriented. Rather than debating what should or shouldn’t be banned, our nation should be focused on how we can ensure America has a competitive advantage in every aspect of AI – including in “open-weight” models that make AI widely accessible and customizable.
From my perspective in the defense tech industry, ceding leadership in open-weight AI models to foreign companies is not a viable option. As we’ve seen in recent conflicts such as the war in Ukraine, modern battlefield challenges demand the application of open-weight models – systems whose trained parameters can be downloaded, adapted and run on infrastructure the user controls. Last year, Reuters reported that Ukraine deliberately avoids reliance on proprietary systems so they can integrate AI into battlefield management systems for troop coordination and enemy monitoring.
