The latest AI doomsayer is China’s intelligence boss

Beijing’s response is to ‘firmly grasp technological sovereignty’ and broad regulations

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China’s minister for State Security has decided AI might be bad for the nation’s ruling Communist Party.

Party secretary and minister Chen Yixin’s views appeared in China Cyberspace Magazine, the flagship publication of China’s Cyberspace Administration (and which readers may recall once carried a piece by Elon Musk).

In Chen’s view, “the field of AI has become the main battleground for global technological competition and a new arena for strategic rivalry among major powers.” His article also recites familiar grievances US sanctions and the possibility AI could be weaponized to detect and exploit software vulnerabilities and then to attack important infrastructure, or to steal industrial and state secrets.

OpenClaw and similar products also worry the minister, who thinks such software has “structural problems such as remote control of device management permissions and leakage of sensitive user information.”

China may also have a PEBCAK * problem because Chen thinks “Some domestic users lack sufficient security awareness, using foreign AI products to process sensitive information and export data overseas, resulting in large-scale data leaks from within the country.”

The minister is also worried how AI challenges China’s Communist Party.

“The application of artificial intelligence brings a large number of uncertainties to social governance and public order,” he observed. “The ‘black box’ of algorithms and the ‘poisoning’ of data may amplify existing social biases. The abuse of personal information during data use may trigger a crisis of user trust. The automatic decision-making of the system creates problems in attribution of responsibility.”

He’s also worried that “rapid development of artificial intelligence has broken through the traditional technology governance framework, causing existing legal norms, ethical principles and governance mechanisms to frequently lag behind in practice, making it difficult to form an effective institutional constraint and supervision system.”

Chen’s suggested response is for China to adhere to the words of President Xi Jinping and modernize China’s national security system and capabilities, so they are ready for AI.

The minister says China must “ensure the independent control of key core technologies, firmly grasp technological sovereignty, and achieve a virtuous cycle and synergistic progress between innovation empowerment and security governance.”

That stance rather suggests Nvidia isn't going to get back into China anytime soon, and AMD can probably write off its prospects of selling many GPUs there too.

Chen also wants “special laws and regulations targeting the research, development, application, and supervision of artificial intelligence technology,” plus improvements to standards and laws “covering the entire chain of technology research and development, application implementation, risk prevention and control, and accountability, focusing on prominent issues such as algorithm security, data protection, ethical norms, and privacy rights.”

The day after Chen’s article appeared, the Cyberspace Administration of China published version 3.0 of the nation’s AI Safety Governance Framework. That document calls for China to “actively employ risk-controllable institutional mechanisms such as regulatory sandboxes to make room for error and correction in the development of new technologies and new applications.”

China also plans to “make every effort to ensure AI safety” and to “take timely measures to address any risks that infringe upon the legitimate rights and interests of individuals, harm public interests, threaten national security, and endanger human survival and development.”

That’s quite the contrast compared to the position taken by US president Donald Trump, who on Monday labeled concerns AI safety a “hoax” and suggested “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” ®

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