U.S. lawmakers have noticed that Chinese AI is growing more popular, CNBC writes.
I’m glad to see that two House committees have begun asking questions, but I saw several claims in the coverage that made me wince. I’m going to take this opportunity to set some facts straight about American and Chinese AI.
Andrew Garbarino, chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security, remarked to CNBC:
Recent reporting that a Chinese open-weight model can match leading U.S. models in certain vulnerability discovery and cybersecurity tasks is highly alarming.
This reporting is largely false, and I’m sad to see a sitting House committee chair amplifying it. No, Chinese models are not as good at cybersecurity as Anthropic’s Mythos. They are, however, much cheaper to run, and adequate for many tasks.
This cost advantage led Andy Ogles, chairman of the Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection, to observe:
If we do nothing, Chinese models become the default foundation of the global digital economy, carrying embedded censorship, uncertain security, and capabilities distilled from our own laboratories with the safety guardrails stripped out.
I give Ogles two point five out of three for accuracy. Not bad. Chinese models do carry censorship; try asking DeepSeek about the Tiananmen Square massacre.
It’s worth noting that U.S. models do some censorship too. Grok at one point seemingly censored negative coverage of certain leaders, and Google’s Gemini was once documented refusing to answer “where is Palestine?” Various kinds of soft censorship and politically noncommittal behavior have featured in the news as well. But I expect significantly tighter and more consistent censorship from China.
Is the security of these models “uncertain”? If anything, that’s an understatement. But security concerns are more a feature of AI in general than Chinese AI in particular. No company, American or Chinese, knows how to exert robust, fine-grained control over the alien agents they’re building. That said, if you access a Chinese AI through a Chinese server, you should probably assume that the whole conversation can be seen and influenced by someone in China.
What about the final claim, “capabilities distilled from our own laboratories with the safety guardrails stripped out”?
This one is also true but slightly misleading. Distillation, or using the outputs of one AI to train another, is common practice in industry. American companies do it, too. When they release a new open model, sharing the AI’s weights so that anyone can run it, there are pretty good odds that model is at least somewhat distilled from Claude or ChatGPT.
An unnamed aide mentioned one proposal being considered: boosting open-weight American AI models, so companies aren’t tempted to turn to China. I think this misses the point. Users can strip guardrails from any open models, not just Chinese ones. If Meta releases an open model that can develop deadly new pathogens, bad actors can easily crack its safeguards, and that model is just as dangerous as a Chinese model with the same capabilities.
What should be done instead? I suspect that the growing popularity of Chinese AI is partly a result of recent American policy errors. We previously covered the administration’s confusing restrictions on American AI.
Today, POLITICO issued a lengthy critique of dysfunction at the Bureau of Industry and Security, which is responsible for controlling the flow of advanced AI technology abroad. Delays in license approvals have doubled since last year, the blacklist of foreign firms that the bureau maintains hasn’t been updated in months, and former officials suspect that thousands of high-end chips have slipped through the widening cracks.
Lawmakers’ attention might be better spent codifying and formalizing transparency and evaluation requirements, and investigating the failures in our enforcement of existing export controls.
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.