Xi calls for global cooperation on AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) should not be dominated by a single country, Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) said yesterday at a major technology conference in Shanghai, urging international cooperation on its development.

Chinese AI models are catching up to the most powerful US offerings and attracting global users with lower costs, but how to govern the sector has become a key question, as concerns grow over military AI deployment or its use by hackers and terrorists.

“AI development should not be a solo performance by a single country, but a symphony of international cooperation,” Xi said at the opening of the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC). “We should jointly oppose overstretching the national security concept in the field of AI or placing one country’s security over that of others.”

Workers install a robotics display at a booth during a media preview of the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, China, on Thursday.

The US and the EU restrict tech exports to China over national security concerns, while tussles between Washington and American AI labs have raised the issue of who controls top technologies.

“China is trying to lead not only in terms of the technology development, but also in terms of AI governance,” Praxis Advisory founder and AI entrepreneur Shengyun Lu said.

AI should be regulated “like we regulate nuclear power,” he said.

The four-day WAIC gathers more than 1,000 of China’s tech firms, officials, researchers and industry figures.

About 3,000 products are on display, from powerful semiconductor systems for AI computing to a smartphone that can autonomously operate apps, but eyes were on the Chinese president’s vision of how the world should handle the potential impacts of AI.

“We should put in place laws and regulations, technological monitoring, early warning and emergency response systems, in order to... ensure AI is always under human control,” Xi told the conference, calling for a “people-centric” approach.

Lu said Western countries are absent from the initiative, as “Europe already has its own AI act and the US is already defining their regulations.”

Leaders including UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet and Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul are attending WAIC, which showcases the cutting edge of Chinese tech.

Early yesterday, the Beijing-based startup Moonshot AI released a powerful new flagship model, Kimi K3, which it said “demonstrated frontier-level performance.”

Other highlights this year include MiniMax’s M3 model and Huawei’s Atlas 950 “supernode,” an AI architecture for learning and reasoning.

“The main theme will be the transition from AI models to systems that can be deployed at scale” in everyday life, tech analyst Poe Zhao said.