US President Joe Biden’s administration is poised to open up a new front in its effort to safeguard US artificial intelligence (AI) from China and Russia with preliminary plans to place guardrails around the most advanced AI models, the core software of AI systems like ChatGPT, sources said.
The US Department of Commerce is considering a new regulatory push to restrict the export of proprietary or closed source AI models, whose software and the data it is trained on are kept under wraps, three people familiar with the matter said.
Any action would complement a series of measures put in place over the past two years to block the export of sophisticated AI chips to China in an effort to slow Beijing’s development of the cutting edge technology for military purposes. Even so, it would be hard for regulators to keep pace with the industry’s fast-moving developments.
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The move was a “typical act of economic coercion and unilateral bullying, which China firmly opposes,” the Chinese embassy said, adding that it would take the “necessary measures” to protect its interests.
Currently, nothing is stopping US AI giants like Microsoft Corp’s OpenAI, Alphabet Inc’s Google DeepMind and rival Anthropic, which have developed some of the most powerful closed source AI models, from selling them to almost anyone without government oversight.
Government and private sector researchers worry that US adversaries could use the models, which mine vast amounts of text and images to summarize information and generate content, to wage aggressive cyberattacks or even create potent biological weapons.
Any new export control would likely target Russia, China, North Korea and Iran, a source said.
Microsoft said in a February report that it had tracked hacking groups affiliated with the Chinese and North Korean governments, Russian military intelligence and Iranian Revolutionary Guards, as they tried to perfect their hacking campaigns using large language models.
To develop an export control on AI models, the US might turn to a threshold in an AI executive order issued in October last year, which is based on the amount of computing power it takes to train a model, sources said, adding that when that level is reached, a developer must report its AI model development plans and provide test results to the US Department of Commerce.
That threshold could become the basis for determining what AI models would be subject to export restrictions, two US officials and another source said. They declined to be named, because details have not been made public.
If used, it would likely only restrict the export of models that have yet to be released, since none are thought to have reached the threshold yet, though Google’s Gemini Ultra is seen as being close, said EpochAI, a research institute that tracks AI trends.
The agency is far from finalizing a rule proposal, the sources said. However, the fact that such a move is under consideration shows that the US government is seeking to close gaps in its effort to thwart Beijing’s AI ambitions.
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