The latest AI doomsayer is China’s intelligence boss

China’s minister for State Security has decided AI might be bad for the nation’s ruling Communist Party.

Party secretary and minister Chen Yixin’s views appeared in China Cyberspace Magazine, the flagship publication of China’s Cyberspace Administration (and which readers may recall once carried a piece by Elon Musk).

In Chen’s view, “the field of AI has become the main battleground for global technological competition and a new arena for strategic rivalry among major powers.” His article also recites familiar grievances about US sanctions and the possibility AI could be weaponized to detect and exploit software vulnerabilities and then to attack important infrastructure, or to steal industrial and state secrets.

OpenClaw and similar products also worry the minister, who thinks such software has “structural problems such as remote control of device management permissions and leakage of sensitive user information.” China may also have a PEBCAK* problem because Chen thinks “Some domestic users lack sufficient security awareness, using foreign AI products to process sensitive information and export data overseas, resulting in large-scale data leaks from within the country.” The minister is also worried about how AI challenges China’s Communist Party.

“The application of artificial intelligence brings a large number of uncertainties to social governance and public order,” he observed.

“The ‘black box’ of algorithms and the ‘poisoning’ of data may amplify existing social biases.

The abuse of personal information during data use may trigger a crisis of user trust.

The automatic decision-making of the system creates problems in attribution of responsibility.” He’s also worried that “rapid development of artificial intelligence has broken through the traditional technology governance framework, causing existing legal norms, ethical principles and governance mechanisms to frequently lag behind in practice, making it difficult to form an effective institutional constraint and supervision system.” Chen’s suggested response is for China to adhere to the words of President Xi Jinping and modernize China’s national security system and capabilities, so they are ready for AI.

The minister says China must “ensure the independent control of key core technologies, firmly grasp technological sovereignty, and achieve a virtuous cycle and synergistic progress between innovation empowerment and security governance.” That stance rather suggests Nvidia isn't going to get back into China anytime soon, and AMD can probably write off its prospects of selling many GPUs there too.