University of California leverages systemwide expertise to advance purposeful, human-centered uses for AI

Under President Milliken's direction and leadership, the University of California launched the AI Steering Committee to highlight and focus UC research on harnessing AI for the public good.

At the September UC Board of Regents meeting, the UC AI Steering Committee provided its first report to the Board, detailing the progress of its working groups and announcing showcase events involving each UC campus over the next year that will highlight campus AI initiatives and research in the fields identified by those working groups.

Formed by President Milliken in May of 2026, the University of California's AI steering committee was established to leverage the university's extraordinary scale of 10 campuses, six academic health centers, and three national labs in navigating AI's increasingly broad impacts on everyday life and the university's mission of education, research, patient care, and public service. The Steering Committee created five working groups focused on AI applications and their impact across the following areas: health and longevity; learning and work; discovery and innovation; protecting humans and humanity; and AI for the public good.

"AI is transforming the way we learn, work, and live," said UC President James B. Milliken. "We hear every day about the increasing potential and the risk of AI. The task force is sharpening our focus on how UC can advance human potential, not diminish it. As a public university with a commitment to California and the nation in its DNA, UC is also ideally positioned to contribute to the broader public discussion on managing the benefits and risks of AI."

Amid calls for a slowdown of AI development, the University of California's AI Steering Committee informed the Board of Regents today of its work in establishing a different path for AI, one of responsible public adoption for the public good.

The report began by addressing the risks of unconsidered AI adoption, including security breaches, fragmented regulation, and increased energy and utility consumption. It established that UC was among the first in the country to adopt a formal set of AI Principles, and the first university to address artificial intelligence explicitly in a Digital Risk Appetite statement, a formal declaration of how much technology risk the institution will accept, and where.

AI Steering Committee Co-Chair Van Williams highlighted the need to responsibly govern AI capacity for UC and detailed existing initiatives to broaden access to AI tools for researchers, employees, and students while promoting ethical and responsible use. These include research awards and computing credits from Amazon and Google, the latter of which has granted more than $32.7 million across 61 funded projects, spanning AI safety and trust research, frontier research, workforce development, and public impact applications at the campuses.

The Steering Committee is seeking coordinated, systemwide approaches with AI developers and cloud providers to ensure UC is not reliant on a single vendor. The committee is also exploring the creation of a systemwide learning platform to support the responsible adoption of AI tools and use of resources.

Sharing perspectives in cybersecurity and in education were two of the steering committee's working group leaders who presented alongside Williams: Giovanni Vigna, distinguished professor in the Department of Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara, head of the working group on protecting humans and humanity, and Rita Raley, professor of English at UC Santa Barbara, who leads the working group on AI for learning and work.

Professor Vigna, who also directs the UC Santa Barbara-based, National Science Foundation-funded Institute for Agent-based Cyber Threat Intelligence and Operation (ACTION), described the sophistication of AI agents in exploiting security flaws, a source of increasing concern. "There is hope," he said. "We need to make an investment in educating people in AI tools and create coordination between all the stakeholders so that threat intelligence between different parts of critical infrastructure can be shared at a scale and pace that is required to make progress in protecting our networks."

Professor Raley, co-director of the new Center for the Humanities and Machine Learning (HUML) at UC Santa Barbara, described a course she developed, "Critical Artificial Intelligence," and the scope of her working group, which will provide systemwide recommendations on what each student needs to know about AI. "The University will continue to certify students on the basis of disciplinary knowledge attained. But, no less important, we must now give students the critical judgment to ask what this technology is, who needs to be accountable for it, how to use it, when to refuse it - and what it could be instead."

Among the examples highlighted by co-chair Williams of AI's potential for public good was the work done at UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco to restore speech back to a patient named Ann, who had lost her speech to a brainstem stroke nearly two decades ago. A joint UC team built a brain-computer interface to convert her attempted speech into audible, natural-sounding words in approximately a second.

"The technology will keep getting more capable whether or not any of us are ready for it," Steering Committee Co-Chair Van Williams said. "How it gets used is still a choice. The university that helped give Ann her voice back intends to keep making that choice deliberately, in public, and for the public."

The Regents item is available here.

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