Risk Assessment of Reinforcement Learning AI Systems: Looking Beyond the Technology

This report presents some of the challenges that the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) may face in fielding an artificial intelligence technology called reinforcement learning (RL) in DoD applications. RL has been credited with expanding the decisionmaking ability of machines beyond that of humans in playing complex games of strategy. RL-enabled systems can beat world experts in these games; can such systems outperform humans in DoD applications?