The United States and China will have their first artificial intelligence meeting on Tuesday. US officials say that Washington will be worried about how Beijing is using this new technology.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the first dialogue, without a set date, during his trip to Beijing last month. US officials said they weren’t expecting any specific agreements or offers to work together from the dialogue. Instead, they wanted a way for each country to talk about how it sees and feels about risk.
China “has made AI development a major national priority” and is rapidly deploying AI capabilities in both civilian and military/national security areas, according to an unnamed US official.
“That, we believe, undermines both US and allied national security,” he said of the Chinese work.
“We will reiterate our concerns about Beijing’s use of AI in that regard.”
Another US official stated that while Washington has previously expressed concern about AI’s potential to tamper with elections, Geneva will not specifically address this issue.
US worries about Chinese AI
When Joe Biden and Xi Jinping met in California in November for a summit, they agreed to start a formal conversation about AI.
Tarun Chhabra and Seth Centre, who work on new technologies at the White House and the State Department, respectively, will represent the US in Geneva, according to Adrienne Watson, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council.
Both China and the US are rapidly developing their AI industries. However, Washington and its allies are growing more worried about what Beijing’s communist government can do.
US experts are worried that Chinese AI engineers are getting better at making “deepfakes,” which are fake versions of real or dead people.
The United States, the European Union and Great Britain have been working to make rules about AI that they say will protect people’s safety and privacy.
China has gone its own way when it comes to AI, but it did go to a big meeting on AI safety last year that Britain called.
US and China Global AI Dynamics
During the talks, China, the US, and other countries unanimously agreed to “collectively manage” AI risks globally. Tensions between the US and China have been rising sharply over the past few years, but they are slowly easing up on their talk.
Last week, officials from the world’s two biggest economies met separately for their most recent talks on climate change. Biden has said that this is an area where both countries can work together.
But the Biden administration hasn’t stopped putting pressure on China. On Tuesday, they’re likely to decide to raise tariffs on Chinese clean energy goods.
The US doesn’t want to send as many advanced semiconductors to China as it does now, and it has threatened to ban the popular video-sharing app TikTok if its Chinese owners don’t sell it.
Last week, TikTok agreed to start labeling AI-generated content from a number of platforms. This is to try to ease concerns about the spread of fake news.
