Despite the hype surrounding China’s artificial intelligence capabilities, progress remains heavily dependent on theft and smuggling. The Chinese Communist party (CCP), meanwhile, is determined to maintain tight control. That has become increasingly clear ahead of this week’s Beijing summit between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. The Chinese leader is determined to lead the world in what he terms an ‘epoch-defining technology’. He appears confident that Trump, preoccupied by his war against Iran, has limited options to counter Beijing’s increasingly brazen activities.
Last month, the White House accused Beijing of ‘industrial-scale’ theft of know-how from American AI labs. Meanwhile, US prosecutors claim to have busted an international smuggling ring that funnelled advanced chips worth billions of dollars to China in defiance of sanctions. The CCP is also stepping up efforts to protect China’s own AI innovation, blocking a $2 billion (£1.5 billion) takeover by Meta of a Chinese AI start-up called Manus. For good measure, the authorities prevented Manus’s two founders from leaving the country.
The accusations of theft refer to a process called ‘distillation’, whereby China is accused of illicitly training its smaller AI models on the output of larger (and expensively developed) US models. A leaked internal memo written by Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said:
