On October 4, 2022, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released the “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights: Making Automated Systems Work for the American People.” It was the product of a year-long process gathering input from affected communities, industry, researchers, and government, and it framed AI governance in the language of civil rights rather than only technical risk.
The blueprint is organized around five principles. Safe and Effective Systems says people should be protected from systems that are unsafe or do not work. Algorithmic Discrimination Protections says systems should be designed and used equitably and should not discriminate. Data Privacy says people should be protected from abusive data practices and have agency over their data. Notice and Explanation says people should know when an automated system is being used and understand how it affects them. Human Alternatives, Consideration, and Fallback says people should be able to opt out where appropriate and reach a person to fix problems.
Importantly, the blueprint is not law and is not enforceable. It is a statement of principles and recommended practices intended to guide design and deployment and to influence agencies and legislators, not a binding regulation.
Why a business reader should care: the blueprint became a common reference point for what “responsible AI” should protect, and its five principles map closely to the obligations later codified in stricter regimes abroad. Organizations using automated decisions on people can treat it as a checklist of expectations even where it carries no legal force.