China's AI policy is taking cues from the US. Are they the right cues to give?
China is considering restricting foreign access to its AI models
China may be changing its approach to the proliferation of its AI models, an article from the Wall Street Journal reports. While it previously leaned into open-weight models and global adoption as a form of “soft power,” officials are now talking about stricter government oversight, including restricting access to foreign entities when products contain sensitive technology.
The recent regulatory hiccups around Fable may be partially responsible for this new view. The article notes:
To Beijing’s regulators, the back-and-forth in Washington has reinforced the idea that governments need to keep a tight grip on powerful AI technology to prevent misuse in areas such as cyberwarfare and bioweapons development.
Moving away from open-weight models (for which company-imposed safeguards are trivially bypassed) and towards increased government oversight (usually better than no oversight) is a good move. But, as with Fable, I think the emphasis on foreign restrictions is misguided.
First, there is no reason a cyber or bio attack need be launched only on a geopolitical rival; domestic terrorism is alive and well, even if the nationalism sometimes used to justify the AI race tends to ignore it. Second, if the US and China both have their own powerful AI models, capable of cyber and bio attacks, then they can launch these attacks against each other without having access to each other’s models. Finally, an AI system capable of launching a cyber or bio attack in pursuit of its own goals (which could happen as these models continue to scale in power) won’t be stopped by borders.
As models scale in power, the nation they are built in matters less and less. And international cooperation to keep humanity safe matters more and more. But today’s emphasis on foreign actors as threats leads to nations pushing models ever forward in capabilities, instead of coming together to govern an increasingly dangerous technology with global impacts. It stymies cooperation, while at the same time making it even more pressing.
Even so, I take some hope from this story. China seems to be following the US’s cues on how to approach AI. The US government tried to ban access to foreign entities — so China might do that too. This means that if the US is vocal about loss of control and extinction risks from racing to build superintelligent systems before we know how they work or how to steer them, China will likely take heed. And if the US pushes for international cooperation to ban superintelligence until such time as we can safely pursue it, China will likely take a seat at that table.
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.