Open Problems in Technical AI Governance
Abstract
AI progress is creating a growing range of risks and opportunities, but it is often unclear how they should be navigated. In many cases, the barriers and uncertainties faced are at least partly technical. Technical AI governance, referring to technical analysis and tools for supporting the effective governance of AI, seeks to address such challenges. It can help to (a) identify areas where intervention is needed, (b) assess the efficacy of potential governance actions, and (c) enhance governance options by designing mechanisms for enforcement, incentivization, or compliance. In this paper, we explain what technical AI governance is, outline why it is important, and present a taxonomy and incomplete catalog of its open problems. This paper is intended as a resource for technical researchers or research funders looking to contribute to AI governance.
Cite
Text
Reuel et al. "Open Problems in Technical AI Governance." Transactions on Machine Learning Research, 2025.Markdown
[Reuel et al. "Open Problems in Technical AI Governance." Transactions on Machine Learning Research, 2025.](https://mlanthology.org/tmlr/2025/reuel2025tmlr-open/)BibTeX
@article{reuel2025tmlr-open,
title = {{Open Problems in Technical AI Governance}},
author = {Reuel, Anka and Bucknall, Benjamin and Casper, Stephen and Fist, Timothy and Soder, Lisa and Aarne, Onni and Hammond, Lewis and Ibrahim, Lujain and Chan, Alan and Wills, Peter and Anderljung, Markus and Garfinkel, Ben and Heim, Lennart and Trask, Andrew and Mukobi, Gabriel and Schaeffer, Rylan and Baker, Mauricio and Hooker, Sara and Solaiman, Irene and Luccioni, Sasha and Rajkumar, Nitarshan and Moës, Nicolas and Ladish, Jeffrey and Bau, David and Bricman, Paul and Guha, Neel and Newman, Jessica and Bengio, Yoshua and South, Tobin and Pentland, Alex and Koyejo, Sanmi and Kochenderfer, Mykel and Trager, Robert},
journal = {Transactions on Machine Learning Research},
year = {2025},
url = {https://mlanthology.org/tmlr/2025/reuel2025tmlr-open/}
}