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.”
Photo: Reuters
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.”
‘ABUSE OF POWER’: Lee Chun-yi allegedly used a Control Yuan vehicle to transport his dog to a pet grooming salon and take his wife to restaurants, media reports said Control Yuan Secretary-General Lee Chun-yi (李俊俋) resigned on Sunday night, admitting that he had misused a government vehicle, as reported by the media. Control Yuan Vice President Lee Hung-chun (李鴻鈞) yesterday apologized to the public over the issue. The watchdog body would follow up on similar accusations made by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and would investigate the alleged misuse of government vehicles by three other Control Yuan members: Su Li-chiung (蘇麗瓊), Lin Yu-jung (林郁容) and Wang Jung-chang (王榮璋), Lee Hung-chun said. Lee Chun-yi in a statement apologized for using a Control Yuan vehicle to transport his dog to a
Taiwan yesterday denied Chinese allegations that its military was behind a cyberattack on a technology company in Guangzhou, after city authorities issued warrants for 20 suspects. The Guangzhou Municipal Public Security Bureau earlier yesterday issued warrants for 20 people it identified as members of the Information, Communications and Electronic Force Command (ICEFCOM). The bureau alleged they were behind a May 20 cyberattack targeting the backend system of a self-service facility at the company. “ICEFCOM, under Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party, directed the illegal attack,” the warrant says. The bureau placed a bounty of 10,000 yuan (US$1,392) on each of the 20 people named in
The High Court yesterday found a New Taipei City woman guilty of charges related to helping Beijing secure surrender agreements from military service members. Lee Huei-hsin (李慧馨) was sentenced to six years and eight months in prison for breaching the National Security Act (國家安全法), making illegal compacts with government employees and bribery, the court said. The verdict is final. Lee, the manager of a temple in the city’s Lujhou District (蘆洲), was accused of arranging for eight service members to make surrender pledges to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army in exchange for money, the court said. The pledges, which required them to provide identification
INDO-PACIFIC REGION: Royal Navy ships exercise the right of freedom of navigation, including in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea, the UK’s Tony Radakin told a summit Freedom of navigation in the Indo-Pacific region is as important as it is in the English Channel, British Chief of the Defence Staff Admiral Tony Radakin said at a summit in Singapore on Saturday. The remark came as the British Royal Navy’s flagship aircraft carrier, the HMS Prince of Wales, is on an eight-month deployment to the Indo-Pacific region as head of an international carrier strike group. “Upholding the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and with it, the principles of the freedom of navigation, in this part of the world matters to us just as it matters in the
RSS