China’s main concerns are about ideology, cyberattacks and government challenges, the AP says. Chen Yixin, the head of its state security ministry, also published an article last Sunday writing that AI «fundamentally transforms the military struggle» amid US AI use for targeting in Iran.
The USA might be more worried about the current existential debate and distillation, but wants to avoid shared risks, meaning there is an opening for agreement on both sides.
Gathering experts for dialogue
Suggestions from a joint expert group consisting of US and Chinese delegations in the «Track II Dialogue on Artificial Intelligence and National Security,» convened by the Brookings Institution and Tsinghua University’s Center for International Security and Strategy, are more focused on suggesting ways to avoid catastrophic risk.
The USA and China may be fierce competitors in the AI space, but both can agree on some basic principles, Reuters writes.
Prioritizing human control of nukes
The first is to guarantee human control of nuclear and cyber capabilities, and the Chinese delegation also proposes a red line on AI attacks on nuclear infrastructure and command and control systems — and a big red hotline between the nations for AI-related crisies, in case of AI actions where reaction time might be mere minutes.
These scenarios are no longer theoretical, as demonstrated by a recent CNN report of an averted attack on a Chinese ship, inadvertently flagged by AI as carrying nuclear weapons components in the Middle East.
Planes were in the air and troops were ready to attack when it was revealed that the information came from a hallucinating military-grade chatbot.
These are the sorts of catastrophic risks talks next week might be able to mitigate, and the structure of an agreement looks much more like an arms control treaty than a broader AI policy program. That said, in diplomacy, the talks about talks can be as important as the talks themselves — and lay the groundwork for future agreements.
Read more: Reuters, Brookings.edu, Associated Press, Axios, and CNN.