The State Department is preparing to meet with leading artificial intelligence companies on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly next month as access to the emerging technology becomes more critical than ever to foreign governments.
Ambassador Nathaniel C. Fick, the inaugural leader of the department’s cyberspace bureau, told The Washington Times that the Biden administration wants AI to spread globally without falling into the hands of troublemakers.
He said department officials will meet with representatives from companies such as Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI to formulate a plan.
“Secretary Blinken is going to host a side event” to the gathering of world leaders, Mr. Fick said in a wide-ranging interview in his Foggy Bottom office. “We’re going to have the main companies there and are going to start getting very concrete about what the provision of use cases and access to AI to solve problems looks like for the whole world.”
He said the Biden administration intends to narrow the focus of AI use cases to areas of common agreement, such as AI to increase the fidelity of weather forecasting, agricultural productivity, medical diagnostics, climate modeling and sustainable development goals.
Foreign governments see the value of AI capabilities in providing economic and national security rewards similar to protection from amassing oil and nuclear weapons. Nations sprinting ahead on developing top tools want a seat at the table of global decision-makers in the AI era.
Mr. Fick said the Biden administration thinks it can rely on companies to spread AI access while ensuring that the most cutting-edge developments do not reach foreign actors who do not share American values and an appreciation for human rights.
“I think that there will be massive and well-funded backlash from across the developing world if they don’t immediately get some equitable access to the benefits of this definitional technology,” Mr. Fick said. “So that’s sort of the source of what we’re going to be doing at the U.N. General Assembly in a few weeks.”
World leaders will meet on AI again in approximately six months at the AI Safety Summit in France.
Mr. Fick said Western nations have an “emerging consensus” about governing AI but nothing final.
“You’ve already seen it in export controls and other things. There are going to be some bounds that need to be put in place,” he said. “Now, it’s a broader philosophical question about whether those things, how effective those things can be over the long haul when smart people are pretty much distributed globally.”
Even if America’s major AI makers adhere to the Biden administration’s agenda, Chinese companies and other foreign competitors racing ahead could do likewise.
Andrew Moore, a former Google executive who advised the U.S. Central Command on AI, said in February that he found China already outperforming U.S. hyperscalers in two application areas that he declined to identify. Hyperscalers refer to Big Tech companies with enormous computing power, such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.
Countering competitors and adversaries on frontier AI will require throttling at least one of three inputs: talent, data and computing power, Mr. Fick said.
Slowing down America’s adversaries will get the nation only so far in the international AI race.
“You cannot, in a sustained way, win a race by kneecapping your opponent,” Mr. Fick said. “You only win a race, in a sustained way, by running faster, which means putting some amount of faith in the power of the innovation economy.”
Mr. Fick said U.S. economic growth surpasses that of its democratic counterparts in East Asia and Western Europe because of the differing approaches to technological innovation.
In his nearly two years as America’s first cyber diplomat, Mr. Fick has garnered a reputation for championing U.S. economic growth where foreign counterparts may favor a tighter governmental grip.
Mr. Fick said he is not single-mindedly pursuing U.S. economic success at the expense of European allies and other nations. He touted his experience in the private sector selling businesses to Europeans and said he wants European nations to build their own tech dynamos.
“If we’re sitting here in a decade having [an] argument about AI because the top 10 AI businesses are all American businesses, we will have missed the boat,” Mr. Fick said he argues to European counterparts. “And so will you.”
• Ryan Lovelace can be reached at rlovelace@washingtontimes.com.
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