America pausing AI sparks concerns about China making gains

Editor’s Note: This piece by Katherine Fung and Anna Commander features quotes from CSP Senior Fellow, Grant Newsham.

With concerns that China will overtake the United States in the Artificial Intelligence field, some experts are cautioning against enacting a pause, endorsed by tech leaders, on “out of control” AI systems.

In an open letter, hundreds of tech leaders, professors and researchers, including Elon Musk, advocated for an “immediate pause for at least six months” on all development of AI systems. They warn that the rapid advancement of contemporary AI systems poses a string of safety concerns, including the difficulty creators may have when it comes to understanding and predicting these new “digital minds.” But the letter received mixed reactions and some argued that pausing American innovation on AI gives China a competitive advantage in the field.

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The concerns raised by programs like GPT-4 have prompted calls like the one in the open letter. Although many in the field recognize that halting research and development in favor of safety protocols in the U.S. is important, “China is not going to slow down its AI development in either the commercial or military domain,” Gregory Allen, the director of the AI Governance Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Newsweek.

“It’s important to remember that morality and decency and harmful effects on the citizenry at large do not matter one whit to Beijing,” Grant Newsham, the author of When China Attacks: A Warning to America, said. “We need to be very careful about that and recognize that too many such halts or refusal to pursue certain research in order to keep the moral high ground could put us at a serious disadvantage.”

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