The White House is proposing requiring US cloud companies to determine whether foreign entities are accessing US data centers to train artificial intelligence (AI) models, US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said on Friday.
“We can’t have non-state actors or China or folks who we don’t want accessing our cloud to train their models,” Raimondo said in an interview.
“We use export controls on chips,” she said. “Those chips are in American cloud data centers, so we also have to think about closing down that avenue for potential malicious activity.”
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US President Joe Biden’s administration is taking a series of measures to prevent China from using US technology for AI, as the burgeoning sector raises security concerns.
The proposed “know your customer” regulation was released on Friday for public inspection and is to be published tomorrow.
“It is a big deal,” Raimondo said.
The US is “trying as hard as we can to deny China the compute power that they want to train their own [AI] models, but what good is that if they go around that to use our cloud to train their models?” she said.
Last month, Raimondo said that the US Department of Commerce would not allow Nvidia Corp to ship its “most sophisticated, highest-processing-power AI chips, which would enable China to train their frontier models.”
The US government is worried about China developing advanced AI systems on a variety of national security grounds and has taken steps to stop Beijing from receiving cutting-edge US technologies to enhance its military.
The proposal would require US cloud computing companies to verify the identity of foreign persons who sign up for or maintain accounts that utilize US cloud computing through a “know-your-customer program or customer identification program.” It would also set minimum standards for identifying foreign users and would require cloud computing firms to certify compliance annually.
Raimondo said that the US cloud computing companies “should have the burden of knowing who their biggest customers are training the biggest models, and we’re trying to get that information. What will we do with that information? It depends on what we find.”
Biden in October last year signed an executive order requiring developers of AI systems that pose risks to US national security, the economy, public health or safety to share the results of safety tests with the US government before they are released to the public.
The commerce department plans to soon send those survey requests to companies.
Raimondo said that companies would have 30 days to respond.
“Any company that doesn’t want to comply is a red flag for me,” she said.
Carl Szabo, general counsel at NetChoice, a tech industry trade group, said that the commerce department is implementing Biden’s “illegal” executive order “to force industry reporting requirements for AI.”
He added that requiring US cloud companies to report use of their resources by non-US entities “for training large language models could deter international collaboration.”
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