China puts equal emphasis on development and security in artificial intelligence (AI) and has released an updated AI safety governance framework, its foreign ministry said.
Foreign ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun made the statement at the ministry’s regular press conference on Tuesday. He addressed questions given by Bloomberg regarding suggestions of some businesses in the U.S. AI industry to slow the technology’s development.
Guo Jiakun said that as AI advances at high speed, it is all the more important to develop it “for good” and for the benefit of people, to calibrate regulation and governance, and to strengthen safeguards to prevent AI from getting out of control.
Guo said China takes seriously the inherent and secondary risks of AI and is committed to holding to a security baseline. The country has made continued efforts to improve laws, regulations, policies, application norms and ethics rules to prevent the abuse and misuse of AI; and to ensure it is “safe, reliable and controllable,” he said.
Guo said AI is a shared asset of humanity and that its development and governance require “true multilateralism,” with all countries working together to build a global governance framework on broad-based consensus. No single country or company can develop effective solutions on its own, he said.
He said China supports the United Nations as the main channel in global AI governance. China is ready to work with other countries to build a just and equitable system for global AI governance, the diplomat added.
Calls from U.S. tech leaders for a slowing down AI development refer to “We Must Pace the Frontier” post made by Anthropic’s chief executive Dario Amodei.