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© Reuters. U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo speaks on Day 1 of the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park in Bletchley, Britain on November 1, 2023.. Leon Neal/Pool by way of REUTERS/File Photo
By David Shepardson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The Biden administration is proposing requiring U.S. cloud firms to find out whether or not international entities are accessing U.S. information facilities to coach AI fashions, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo mentioned on Friday.
“We can’t have non-state actors or China or folks who we don’t want accessing our cloud to train their models,” Raimondo mentioned in an interview with Reuters. “We use export controls on chips,” she famous. “Those chips are in American cloud data centers so we also have to think about closing down that avenue for potential malicious activity.”
The Biden administration is taking a collection of measures to stop China from utilizing U.S. expertise for synthetic intelligence, because the burgeoning sector raises safety issues.
The proposed “know your customer” regulation was launched on Friday for public inspection and will likely be revealed on Monday. “It is a big deal,” Raimondo mentioned.
The United States is “trying as hard as we can to deny China the compute power that they want to train their own (AI) models, but what good is that if they go around that to use our cloud to train their models?” she mentioned.
Last month, Raimondo mentioned Commerce wouldn’t enable Nvidia (NASDAQ:) “to ship is the most sophisticated, highest-processing-power AI chips, which would enable China to train their frontier models.”
The U.S. authorities is anxious about China growing superior AI techniques on quite a lot of nationwide safety grounds and has taken steps to cease Beijing from receiving cutting-edge U.S. applied sciences to strengthen its navy.
The proposal would require U.S. cloud computing firms to confirm the id of international individuals who join or preserve accounts that make the most of U.S. cloud computing by way of a “know-your-customer program or Customer Identification Program.” It would additionally set minimal requirements for figuring out international customers and would require cloud computing companies to certify compliance yearly.
Raimondo mentioned U.S. cloud computing firms “should have the burden of knowing who their biggest customers are training the biggest models, and we’re trying to get that information. What will we do with that information? It depends on what we find.”
President Joe Biden in October signed an government order requiring builders of AI techniques that pose dangers to U.S. nationwide safety, the economic system, public well being or security to share the outcomes of security assessments with the U.S. authorities earlier than they’re launched to the general public.
The Commerce Department plans to quickly ship these survey requests to firms. Raimondo instructed Reuters firms may have 30 days to reply. “Any company that doesn’t want to comply is a red flag for me,” she mentioned.
Carl Szabo, basic counsel at NetChoice, a tech business commerce group, mentioned Commerce is implementing Biden’s “illegal” government order “to force industry reporting requirements for AI.” He added that requiring U.S. cloud firms to report use of their assets by non-U.S. entities “for training large language models could deter international collaboration.”
Top cloud suppliers embody Amazon.com (NASDAQ:)’s AWS, Alphabet (NASDAQ:)’s Google Cloud and Microsoft (NASDAQ:)’s Azure unit.