Reaching Mount Everest-rivaling heights of political hypocrisy, China has slammed the United States over Washington’s admission that it spies on Beijing’s artificial intelligence programs.
Beijing’s anger follows U.S. actions last week that drew attention to China’s AI-related threats. These included the AI company Anthropic’s announcement that Chinese spies had attempted to use its Claude AI system for varied malicious purposes. CIA Deputy Director Michael Ellis also publicly admitted that his agency spies on Chinese research in AI, semiconductors, and biotechnology. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency further warned that, “China-based artificial intelligence (AI) companies are conducting systematic extraction of proprietary functionalities and capabilities of U.S. AI companies’ models through industrial-scale knowledge distillation campaigns that form the core — not merely a supplement — of their AI development strategy.”
Distillation is a process by which AI developers use an existing AI system to develop their own system. CISA added, “While ‘distillation’ is recognized as a legitimate and useful technique in AI research, China-based AI companies are engaging in aggressive, malicious, and targeted distillation activities at an industrial scale that extract restricted proprietary functionalities and capabilities of U.S. frontier AI models.”
None of this American activity should be controversial. As with its industrial research policy generally, the only limit to what China steals when it comes to high-tech research is what it can get its hands on. Led by the Ministry of State Security and People’s Liberation Army Cyberspace Force, Chinese economic and technology thievery is truly vast in scale. The U.S. is thus doing in a far narrower sense what China is doing to it. Moreover, it must be doing this. Just consider why, for example, the U.S. might be monitoring Chinese biotechnology efforts. Might it partly be because of the COVID-19 pandemic and that virus’s likely origin in a Chinese military laboratory?
The Chinese Communist Party is very upset at being played at its own game, however. In turn, its complaints have come both fast and furious.
The Chinese Ministry of Commerce screeched that the U.S. had exposed its “hegemonic robbery logic to the light. China expressed serious concern and firmly opposed this.” It declared that “The U.S. claims that China poses a ‘dual threat’ to military and economic threats is a completely distorted bandit narrative and malicious slander. China’s technological breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and biotechnology are the result of the hard work of Chinese researchers and enterprises…” A Chinese foreign ministry added that China is “a firm defender of cybersecurity“
And socialists are firm defenders of capitalism.
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The truth is very different, of course. While China has some truly excellent homegrown scientists and has made great leaps in its military innovations, its technology research remains rooted in capricious, unrestrained efforts to steal information from abroad. This isn’t a debatable point, but rather a basic reality. A reality understood not simply by the U.S., but by nations from the Netherlands to New Zealand.
That the Chinese Communist Party is so ardent in resisting this reality only underlines its disdain for the truth — and its never-ending love affair with hypocrisy.