The Commerce Department’s (DOC) new export-controls restrictions, announced Oct. 7, could successfully hamper China’s growth in critical technology industries, such as artificial intelligence (AI), but they would likely be more effective if allies of the U.S. would enact similar restrictions.
That's what Greg Allen, director of the AI Governance Project and Senior Fellow of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) said in the Oct. 11 episode of “The Truth of the Matter” podcast, hosted by H. Andrew Schwartz, CSIS chief communications officer.
Allen contends that with the new policy, the U.S. is "not merely trying to restrain China’s technological progress. We are trying to reverse it."
“It was a major reversal of the entire U.S. approach to technology and trade for China, which has been in place now for more than two decades," Allen said about the the DOC’s Bureau of Industry and Security's (BIS) recently announced "New Export Controls on Advanced Computing and Semiconductor Manufacturing Items to the People’s Republic of China (PRC)."
"There’s sort of two things that I would highlight in that regard," Allen said in the podcast. "The first is when it comes to selling technology to China, the sort of overarching approach has been, yes, we will sell technology to China, but generally not the state-of-the-art stuff. So China’s technological progress is allowed to advance, but the United States is still kept ahead."
Allen stated the second area in which the policy is a "major reversal" regards who the U.S. can sell to in China.
"Historically, U.S. trade with China has been restricted on a no military end-use and no military end-user basis," he said. "But this new policy dramatically expands to a lot of new technologies a no-China policy for the most advanced air ships that power the most advanced A.I. algorithms. You just can’t sell them to China at all,” Allen said in the podcast.
Allen contends that China has so successfully evaded the U.S.'s no military end-use policy "that we have no option but to restrict the sales of this technology to all of China."
"I think just in general, all of D.C. is so excited about should we export-control this, should we export-control that? And nowhere near enough people are spending enough time and asking 'Do export controls work? What percentage of the time do they work? How expensive is it to enforce export controls?'" Allen said on the podcast.
"Right now, the United States is trying to go around and persuade a lot of its allies to adopt equivalent export controls because there are other countries that are in the game in this field of AI and semiconductor technology," Allen said. "These export controls really need to be made multilateral very, very soon.”
On the podcast, Allen also emphasized China’s use of AI in conducting surveillance on its citizens, especially Uyghur Muslims, and said that AI is the future of warfare.
Human Rights Watch and the Citizen Lab reports found enhanced efforts by the Chinese government to track its citizens through DNA samples, Popular Science reported in a Sept. 19 article. Emile Dirks, postdoctoral fellow for the Citizen Lab, said they believe the program is a form of social control directed against Tibet’s people.
A recent video report from the New York Times’ Visual Investigations team, which draws on data provided by ChinaFile, found that the Chinese government is collecting data on its citizens’ appearances, voices, and technological devices at a larger scale “than previously known.” Around half of the world’s approximately 1 billion surveillance cameras are located in China, according to analysts’ estimates.
Thea D. Rozman Kendler, assistant secretary of Commerce for Export Administration, said that the PRC uses AI to monitor, track, and surveil their own citizens, and fuel its military modernization, the DOC announcement reports.
“The PRC has poured resources into developing supercomputing capabilities and seeks to become a world leader in artificial intelligence by 2030. It is using these capabilities to monitor, track, and surveil their own citizens, and fuel its military modernization,” Rozman Kendler said in the announcement. “Our actions will protect U.S. national security and foreign policy interests while also sending a clear message that U.S. technological leadership is about values as well as innovation.”
