October 29, 2023

The Race to Regulate

Source: The Wire China

Journalist: Rachel Cheung

A large U.S. delegation will also travel to Bletchley Park this week, where the British government is hosting its AI Safety Summit. The UK’s decision to include China in the summit drew considerable pushback at home and from key allies, including the U.S., the EU and Japan. “[The Summit] is going to be a test case for China’s willingness and ability to engage constructively from the American and allies’ perspective,” says Jacob Stokes, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security.

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At stake in the battle to get domestic regulation right is more than just the most popular chatbot. As Stokes, of the Center for a New American Security, notes, it is nearly impossible to separate civilian uses of AI from military uses. Whoever has the commercial edge, he says, will likely have the military edge as well.

"A lot of the innovations that are happening in AI are coming from the civilian sector and then being applied to military purposes,” he says. “This is an inverse situation from what we saw in the Cold War, where a lot of cutting-edge capabilities were developed for the military and government labs and then eventually trickled out to the commercial sector.”

Yet, even at the height of the Cold War, the U.S. and the Soviet Union found ways to collaborate on technological governance.

Read the full story and more from The Wire China.

Author

  • Jacob Stokes

    Senior Fellow, Indo-Pacific Security Program

    Jacob Stokes is a Senior Fellow for the Indo-Pacific Security Program at CNAS, where his work focuses on U.S.-China relations, Chinese foreign and military policy, East Asian ...