…

Every month Chinese AI developers such as DeepSeek and Xiaomi dispatch the latest versions of their “open-weight” models that allow users to take the core software and use it without paying an expensive ongoing licence.

In Britain, we love cheap Chinese kit, usually setting aside any concerns about how it was made and who by.

…

Beijing has huge surveillance capabilities, using AI to capture images of its citizens and monitor their activities if they need to.

Don’t think it means Chinese people are under virtual house arrest. They can go about their daily lives, gathering in the street for an impromptu dance or to discuss how their local region might be better run. But serious dissidents? They are rooted out and sidelined, re-educated or punished.

For the central committee, AI is a blessing. While the financial constraints from having to please a domestic audience have not entirely disappeared, Beijing’s leaders can concentrate on the threats they face from the rest of the world.

Not that it wants to invade countries in the same manner as Russia. China’s reinvigorated belt and road initiative creates permanent channels for trade less obviously than the previous iteration, allowing Beijing to turn states into clients who depend for the basics of life on Chinese technology.

Where Russia is using AI to enhance cyber-attacks on European government agencies and businesses to create chaos, China wants merely to widen the circle of friends that consume its goods without asking awkward questions.

…

As Ross Burley says, Chinese AI comes with extra baggage. Burley is director of the Centre for Information Resilience (CIR), an independent, non-profit group dedicated to, among other things, exposing human rights abuses and countering disinformation.

He says DeepSeek cannot access the properly isolated use of its software, “but that addresses just part of the risk. Running a model on your own servers doesn’t automatically remove any political censorship. Or indeed repair weaknesses in any security defences.”

"We should be deeply concerned about embedding Beijing’s political restrictions into systems that businesses and public services rely on for information and decisions,” he says.

…

Michael Wooldridge, a professor of AI at the University of Oxford, says it is not unreasonable to assume data inputted into the chatbot could be shared with the Chinese state.

The consequences for policymaking are profound. The UK should reject the lure of cheap Chinese AI and seek to better tame US AI while supporting domestic and EU suppliers.

Relying on Chinese tech, from cars to AI, is going to hollow out industry and undermine the security of our data.

…

Archived