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Tech war: US wants cloud firms to report foreign users tapping their computing power for AI applications
- The US Commerce Department starts process requiring American cloud firms to disclose when a foreign user trains an artificial intelligence model
- The Biden administration wants such disclosures in an effort to detect foreign actors that might use AI to launch ‘malicious cyber-enabled activity’
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United States Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said her department is exploring how to force cloud companies to disclose when a foreigner taps their computing power to fuel artificial intelligence (AI) applications, signalling the next phase of the tech war between Washington and Beijing.
“We’re beginning the process of requiring US cloud companies to tell us every time a non-US entity uses their cloud to train a large language model (LLM),” Raimondo said at an event on Friday, without naming any countries or firms. LLMs are the software behind AI tools like ChatGPT.
US President Joe Biden in October directed the agency to require such disclosures in an effort to detect foreign actors that might use AI to launch “malicious cyber-enabled activity”, according to Biden’s directive.
The Commerce Department has also been looking into ways to regulate the cloud via export controls, following up on sweeping restrictions limiting China’s access to the most powerful semiconductors.
The worry in Washington is that Chinese companies can access the same computing power of those chips through cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Corp’s Azure and Alphabet’s Google Cloud.
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