OPINION:
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As the U.S. government continues seeking to comply with President Biden’s recent executive order to implement “safe, secure and trustworthy” artificial intelligence, it must ensure that the contractors it partners with to secure this objective divest themselves of their ties to the Chinese government.
The Chinese Communist Party sees AI as tantamount to its economic and military ambitions. The People’s Liberation Army’s Academy of Military Sciences, National Defense University and National University of Defense Technology have even said that AI and intelligent weapons could define who wins future wars.
For this reason, President Xi Jinping is accelerating funding for AI weapons development projects in China’s army, navy, air force and Rocket Force. Although the U.S. Department of Defense similarly recognizes that AI “will change society and, ultimately, the character of war,” the United States continues relying on Chinese-connected companies to expand and operationalize its AI industry.
Perhaps the White House recognizes the obvious national security concerns that this poses. At an event at the World Economic Forum this month, Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, which recently began enabling the U.S. government to adopt AI technologies for “mission critical solutions,” stated that the White House categorized the plan they recently submitted on AI safety and security as “incomplete.”
This characterization seems fair given that the company, which has an AI lab in China, recently found itself subjected to a hack that exposed the email accounts of the U.S. ambassador to China, the assistant secretary of state for East Asia, and the secretary of commerce to Beijing-linked hackers ahead of a critical U.S.-China meeting.
According to Sen. Ron Wyden’s letter to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the company’s “negligent cybersecurity practices” led to the attack.
Yet the company continues to maintain a strategic partnership agreement to bring advanced AI and machine learning capabilities to China’s top drone manufacturer, Shenzhen DJI Innovation Technology Co., even though the Department of Defense has blacklisted the company’s products from the U.S. over espionage and national security concerns.
Microsoft is far from the only tech company in the AI space that retains ties with the Chinese government; most of the American tech sector does. Still, the recent hacking it experienced demonstrates how significant a national security threat it is for America’s AI industry to come in such proximity to the Chinese government.
China steals between $225 billion and $600 billion in intellectual property from the United States annually, including matters of the highest intelligence and national security sensitivity. Moreover, under China’s civil-military fusion laws, nothing that its companies do can be independent of the state. By law, its companies must share data and comply with the Communist Party’s demands. Any data and intelligence that can help the country cement its AI dominance are of the highest priority, because China views AI as a revolutionary factor in military power and civil-military fusion — so much so that China has said it aims to lead the world in AI by 2030.
Washington should not pass laws prohibiting the government from working with any particular U.S. contractor. It should, however, mandate that all current and prospective AI contractors adhere to reasonable divestment standards to continue receiving the government’s business.
The Trump and Biden administrations and bipartisan coalitions in Congress have imposed relational restrictions on many other industries. They would be foolish not to do the same with AI.
Accenture Research and Frontier Economics calculated that AI could “double annual economic growth rates” in 2035, so it is not surprising that China is trying to become the leader in this sector by 2030. The U.S. cannot let that happen. That would be catastrophic for human rights and the geopolitical balance of power on the world stage.
As the American Securities Project put it, “If the U.S. government doesn’t set guardrails now, American firms pursuing lucrative Chinese markets may vanguard the Chinese Communist Party’s transition to fifth-generation warfare.”
Indeed. That is in no one’s interest. The time is now for Washington to change this paradigm while it still can.
• Jianli Yang is a renowned scholar, human rights activist, and architect and leader for China’s democracy. He was a participant of the 1989 Tiananmen democracy movement and a political prisoner of China from 2002 to 2007. Mr. Yang helped found and lead several important organizations including Citizen Power Initiatives for China and the Foundation for China in the 21st Century.
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