Cyber Week in Review: October 20, 2023
China unveils Global AI Governance Initiative
This week, China’s President Xi Jinping announced the Global AI Governance Initiative (GAIGI), a new initiative to govern artificial intelligence, during a speech at the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation. The initiative will focus on several issues: ensuring AI is beneficial to human progress, opposing exclusive groups that obstruct AI development in certain countries, establishing a testing and assessment system for AI risk levels, establishing an international institution to govern AI, and ensuring that assistance is provided to developing countries. The GAIGI is expected to bring together all 155 countries which make up the Belt and Road Initiative, making it one of the largest AI governance forums created. China has taken a number of steps to govern AI in recent months, including issuing draft rules for an ethics review process for the development of some kinds of AI models which could prohibit certain kinds of models trained on data the Chinese government considers harmful.
United States expands microchip export controls against China
The U.S. Commerce Department is tightening export controls against China, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo announced earlier this week. An earlier export control order, released in October 2022, had banned the export of chips above certain thresholds [PDF] of development, limiting China’s access to a variety of chips, including advanced graphical processing units (GPU), which are often used to train advanced AI models. After the controls were implemented, chipmakers rolled out GPUs which were slightly below the thresholds set by the Biden administration in its original order. The updated controls will now restrict the export of those chips, which include the Nvidia A800 and H800, to China. The Chinese government attacked the restrictions in a statement, with a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington saying that the restrictions would disrupt and destabilize global supply chains.
X tests charging users for posting on Twitter
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X, formerly known as Twitter, will begin charging new users in New Zealand and the Philippines $1 a year for the ability to post on its service. Under the program, users will still be able to view content on the platform, but will not be able to post unless they pay. Twitter CEO Elon Musk had floated the idea of charging everyone to use Twitter in September, which he claimed would “reduce spam, manipulation of our platform and bot activity.” During the process of buying Twitter, Musk had threatened to withdraw from the deal unless Twitter’s team could reduce spam on the platform. Twitter has seen a major fall in advertising revenue since Musk joined the platform, with revenue down 59 percent between 2022 and 2023 when measured over a five week sample starting April 1.
Five Eyes intelligence heads warns of widespread Chinese espionage
The heads of the Five Eyes intelligence agencies (Australia, Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom), met for a summit in Menlo Park, California earlier this week. The meeting focused on the threat of emerging technologies, and several of the heads raised concerns about China’s espionage attempts. MI5 Director General Ken McCallum said that China was heavily focused on stealing cutting-edge intellectual property from startups and universities and that MI5 believed that Chinese intelligence agents had approached at least twenty thousand people in the UK online. The five intelligence heads emphasized that China is focused on gathering intelligence on emerging technologies, and that most of the cutting-edge developments are taking place in companies and universities that may not think of themselves as targets for intelligence collection.
FBI seizes eighteen domains used by North Korean IT workers
The FBI and Justice Department announced that they had seized eighteen domains used by North Korean information technology workers offer freelance IT work to businesses in the United States and other countries, with the profits from their work being used to fund North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. The websites were designed to imitate the websites of legitimate U.S. freelance forums, and the workers had built a network of pseudonymous emails, payment options, and proxy computers designed to convince businesses that they were based in the United States. North Korea has frequently turned to cyberspace as a source of revenue, with half of all funding for North Korea’s nuclear weapons program coming from its theft of cryptocurrency, according to an estimate by a White House official earlier this year.
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