China’s spy chief just offered a window into Beijing’s priorities when it comes to AI’s biggest risks.
Chen Yixin, China’s minister of state security, published an article Sunday morning in China Cyberspace, a journal run by the Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s internet regulator.
In it, Chen identified six major risks AI could pose to Beijing. The first was “regime security.”
He wrote that “various hostile forces and malicious individuals abuse generative AI technologies — such as deepfake audio and video, AI-generated images and text, and intelligent online armies — to produce political rumors at low cost and in large quantities.”
Those tools can “spread harmful information, incite antagonistic emotions, and wage a war of public opinion and cognitive warfare,” posing direct threats to China’s political, institutional, and ideological security, he said.
Chen also identified five other major AI risks, including:
- Dangers to China’s critical infrastructure, because cyberattacks can be carried out with extreme efficiency, considering the power of models like Mythos.
- The risk of large-scale data leaks, where Chinese AI users and foreign intelligence agencies alike could obtain critical national data, trade secrets, or citizens’ personal information.
- An imbalance in technological development caused by monopolies and closed technological systems, as countries can exploit AI’s power and fragment supply chains in the name of national security.
- Challenges to social governance that lead to disruptions in public order.
- Fundamental shifts in warfare, as AI-powered precision targeting gives adversaries a major advantage on the battlefield.
More regulation for the ‘wellbeing of all humanity’
Chen advocated for strong “developmental guidelines” for AI to be put in place — essentially, more government control of AI development.
What that involves, per Chen, will be for Beijing to “accelerate the construction of a security risk prevention and control system.” China should promote the “healthy and orderly development” of AI through “high-efficiency governance,” Chen said.
Chen also said AI should be developed “with the wellbeing of all humanity as its guiding principle.”
He added, too, that global powers must “resolutely resist hegemonism, technological barriers, and exclusive blocs,” and work to set up a “fair and open international AI rules system.”
Chen’s comments come as Chinese leader Xi Jinping advocated for AI progress at the BRICS summit in New Delhi on Sunday.
“We should take a people-centered approach, develop AI for the positive and for good, and work faster to evolve a consensus-based global AI governance framework, so that new technologies can light the way toward shared prosperity,” Xi said.
The comments from Chen and Xi came as the debate over a possible AI apocalypse heats up in the US. Over the weekend, Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk all backed calls to slow the pace of frontier AI development.
The CEOs voiced these concerns after several of their employees issued public warnings that the products they are making, if developed unchecked, could wipe out most of humanity.
In the most high profile instance, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic, saying both the lab and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI are “gambling with our lives.”
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