At this weekend’s World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, boxing robots thrilled the crowd. But the real heavyweight bout is between the US and China over the future of AI.
The theme of the Shanghai conference, which was organized in part by the Chinese government and lasts until Monday, is “global solidarity in the AI era.” In his keynote address, Chinese Premier Li Qiang called for a new global organization to coordinate responses to AI advancements.
“Overall, global AI governance is still fragmented. Countries have great differences, particularly in terms of areas such as regulatory concepts, institutional rules,” he said, speaking in Chinese. “We should strengthen coordination to form a global AI governance framework that has broad consensus as soon as possible.”
Li’s pitch contrasted with comments made by US President Donald Trump earlier in the week. On Wednesday, the US president released his “AI Action Plan” and signed three executive orders. All of them, Trump said, were designed to free AI companies from regulatory burdens.
“From this day forward, it’ll be a policy of the United States to do whatever it takes to lead the world in artificial intelligence,” he said before signing his executive orders.
Trump’s doctrine will likely benefit American AI companies. Many of them, like OpenAI, Meta, and Google DeepMind, submitted recommendations to the president and praised the new policies.
However, it’s an open question whether forgoing stricter regulations in the United States will benefit humanity.
AI industry leaders have long warned about the threats AI could pose — everything from disinformation and economic inequality to total loss of all human control.
In 2023, a group of prominent AI scientists, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, signed a one-sentence statement calling for AI regulation.
“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” it said.
Altman said last year that AI could have a “negative impact way beyond the realm of one country.” He said the tech should be regulated by an “international agency looking at the most powerful systems and ensuring reasonable safety testing.”
One way to do that is through an agreed-upon global framework similar to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which is enforced by the United Nations and which all but four countries have signed. The UN tech chief, Doreen Bogdan-Martin, told the AFP on Saturday that the world urgently needed a global deal to regulate AI.
“We have the EU approach. We have the Chinese approach. Now we’re seeing the US approach. I think what’s needed is for those approaches to dialogue,” she said.
The Trump administration, however, is likely to hinder any such international agreement. Beyond its own effort to loosen restrictions at home, it has largely dismissed other global collaborations in favor of its America First policy.
At the Shanghai conference, Geoffrey Hinton, a computer scientist known as the Godfather of AI, said international cooperation on AI would be difficult. He said few countries agree on basics like how misinformation should be policed.
He said there was one subject, however, on which the whole world seems aligned: Humans should not let AI supersede their control.
“So on that particular issue, it should be easy to get international collaboration,” he said at the conference, adding, however, that it “may be difficult with the current US administration.”
“But rational countries will collaborate on that,” he said.
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