How to design an AI ethics board

The development and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) systems poses significant risks to society. To reduce these risks to an acceptable level, AI companies need an effective risk management process and sound risk governance. In this paper, we explore a particular way in which AI companies can improve their risk governance: by setting up an AI ethics board. We identify five key design choices: (1) What responsibilities should the board have? (2) What should its legal structure be? (3) Who should sit on the board? (4) How should it make decisions? (5) And what resources does it need? We break each of these questions down into more specific sub-questions, list options, and discuss how different design choices affect the board’s ability to reduce societal risks from AI. Several failures have shown that designing an AI ethics board can be challenging. This paper provides a toolbox that can help AI companies to overcome these challenges.