China’s AI Ambitions Stifled by Censorship, Giving U.S. an Edge

China’s efforts to lead in generative AI are being hampered by the government’s need to control political speech, potentially giving the U.S. an advantage in the global AI race.

Regulatory hurdles: The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) is imposing stringent requirements on Chinese tech companies developing AI models:

• AI companies must collect thousands of sensitive keywords and questions that violate “core socialist values” and prepare datasets of questions the models will decline to answer, many of which relate to political ideology and criticism of the Communist Party.
• Chatbots are designed to refuse answering politically controversial queries and must end conversations if users ask too many such questions in a row.

Impact on AI development: Complying with the government’s political demands is slowing down China’s progress in generative AI:

• Training models is slower when companies have to remove politically sensitive information from data.
• Despite efforts to sanitize chatbot outputs, the unpredictable nature of generative AI means the government can never be 100% certain the bots won’t generate content deemed seditious.
• Development time and computing resources spent on building ideological guardrails can’t be used to improve the AIs’ speed and utility.

Contrasting approaches: While China was the first major nation to create detailed AI regulations, the U.S. and EU are taking different approaches:

• The Biden administration has mandated relatively modest transparency rules for companies working at the cutting edge of AI capabilities.
• The EU is finalizing more comprehensive rules governing data use and privacy standards for AI, which U.S. tech firms claim will hobble EU-based AI development.

Broader implications: China’s authoritarian system could prove decisive in tipping the global AI race in America’s favor, even as the U.S. tries to restrict China’s access to high-end chips and hardware. The demands of China’s political censorship are creating significant obstacles for its AI companies trying to catch up to their Western counterparts. While U.S. companies complain about the potential impact of EU regulations on AI development, the restrictions faced by Chinese firms serve as a stark reminder of what a truly stifling regulatory regime looks like.