UN effort to ban “killer robots” falls short, China to impose restrictions on algorithms, and Intel lands in hot water over Xinjiang reference

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Worth Knowing

UN Effort to Ban “Killer Robots” Fizzles: The United Nations’ Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons failed to move forward on a binding agreement that could have placed limits on — or even banned entirely — the use of lethal autonomous weapons systems. The review conference of the CCW meets every five years, and activists had pegged this meeting as the best chance to get LAWS restrictions on the books. Despite backing from UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and support from a number of prominent advocacy groups, that effort fell short. While a majority of the 125 countries belonging to the agreement said they favored regulating LAWS, the decision would have required unanimity, and a number of states — including the United States and Russia — objected. In pre-conference discussions, the U.S. representative argued for a “non-binding code of conduct” instead of binding regulations. While the CCW failed to bear fruit for supporters of a LAWS ban, it is not the only avenue for international regulation — as Jeremy Kahn explained in Fortune, LAWS ban advocates could turn to the UN General Assembly or other international forums as part of future efforts.
China Rolls Out New Algorithm Rules: Last week, Chinese regulators finalized new rules on the use of algorithmic recommendation systems. The regulations (translation available here), which were proposed last August, place significant limits on the tech companies’ content recommendation algorithms and give users the ability to opt out or limit their use of the systems. The new law, set to go into effect on March 1, will:
  • Require companies to display information about how the algorithms work and their intended purpose.
  • Give users the ability to opt out of using algorithmic recommendation systems entirely, opt out of personalized recommendation systems specifically, or delete personalized tags used by algorithms to make individual recommendations.  
  • Place limits on models that cause users to “become addicted or spend too much.”
  • Bar algorithms that “generate or synthesize fake news information,” (a new addition since the draft regulations).
Observers have noted that while some of the law’s provisions — namely those that ban the promotion of fake news, deepfakes, and “negative information”  — are ambitious, it is unclear whether companies possess the technical ability to detect and remove such content. While the penalties for violating the law are relatively small — fines can reach up to approximately $15,600 — the prevalence of algorithmic recommendation systems among such Chinese companies as Tencent, Alibaba and ByteDance means the new law will likely still have a significant effect.  
Intel Letter Referencing Xinjiang Sparks Backlash in China: Intel apologized to Chinese partners and customers and removed references to Xinjiang from an annual letter to suppliers after facing a wave of criticism from Chinese social and state media. The original letter (an archived version is available here) had said the company “is required to ensure our supply chain does not use any labor or source goods or services from the Xinjiang region.” U.S., EU and other government sanctions — including the Uyghur Forced Labor Protection Act, which President Biden signed last month — have targeted businesses with ties to the region due to the Chinese government’s campaign of repression against the Uyghur population in Xinjiang — which the U.S. government has declared a genocide — and the use of Uyghur forced labor. The letter went viral on Chinese social media sites (with Chinese state media joining the pile on), prompting Intel to issue an apology “for the trouble caused to our respected Chinese customers, partners, and the public.” By this week, all references to Xinjiang had been scrubbed from the letter. Intel is far from the first company to be caught in the middle of a Xinjiang sanction-related controversy, but its swift capitulation highlights the power that China holds in the semiconductor market, even as its domestic chip production lags behind rivals. The country is Intel’s largest market, accounting for approximately $20 billion in sales — roughly 26 percent of its annual revenue — in 2020.
Government Updates

Harvard Professor Convicted for Concealing Ties to China: Charles Lieber, a Harvard chemistry professor, was found guilty last month of making false statements to the U.S. government about his involvement with China’s Thousand Talents Program and failing to report income he received for his work there. Lieber’s high-profile case brought increased attention to the Justice Department’s China Initiative, launched under the Trump administration in 2018 to crack down on China’s targeting of U.S. technology, including early stage research. Lieber’s involvement with the Thousand Talents Program — a PRC initiative to attract foreign scientists and engineers — was not itself illegal, but his work with the Wuhan University of Technology attracted scrutiny that ultimately resulted in other charges. Most of the academics charged in China Initiative prosecutions have been accused of wire fraud or making false statements, not espionage — a fact critics have argued is a sign of the initiative’s overreach, though its supporters contend that the scale of Chinese espionage efforts make such “creative solutions” necessary.

White House Releases Guidance on Research Security: In related news, the White House issued a document providing implementation guidance for federal agencies as they update their research security policies. During the final week of the Trump administration, the White House issued a presidential memorandum that directed agencies to standardize their disclosure requirements with the aim of tightening research security. With many of the China Initiative’s flagship cases hinging on disclosure requirement misconduct, the memo has naturally attracted significant attention from researchers who receive U.S. government funding. Developed by an interagency panel at the direction of Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Eric Lander, the new guidance document focuses on standardizing disclosure requirements across agencies, implementing “digital persistent identifiers” to ease disclosure and encouraging communication between agencies, among other things. While the guidance did not address the China Initiative directly, Lander’s foreword struck an assuring tone, stressing the importance of avoiding measures that could create a “chilling atmosphere” for researchers. Lander has directed a handful of federal agencies to develop model grant application forms within the next 120 days that clearly articulate disclosure requirements.

DARPA Releases Toolkit to Help AI Developers Shore Up Defenses: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency released a toolkit to aid AI developers in testing their models’ defenses against attacks. While the Pentagon has increasingly embraced AI and machine learning tools, their adoption is not without potential risk — as the NSCAI warned in its final report last year, AI systems can be vulnerable to adversarial attacks, and it urged the U.S. government to step up its efforts on AI defense. DARPA’s “Guaranteeing AI Robustness against Deception” (GARD) program brought together researchers from academia and industry to compile a set of open-source tools (available here) that can help AI developers identify vulnerabilities and make their systems robust against a range of attacks. The toolkit includes a virtual evaluation testbed, a benchmark dataset, and “test dummies” that can help developers identify insufficient defenses — all open to the broader developer community through GitHub.

In Translation
CSET’s translations of significant foreign language documents on AI

PRC Military-Civil Fusion Plan: Xianning City Action Plan for In-Depth Development of Military-Civil Fusion (2021-2025) (Revised Draft). This plan is one example of how local PRC governments are implementing China’s “military-civil fusion” strategy, which encourages the Chinese military to tap into private-sector innovation and allows private companies to commercialize select military innovations. Like other PRC industrial policies, this local plan calls for the government to aid the expansion of leading private companies. Unlike many other military-civil fusion strategies, which focus on the high-tech sector, this one describes how local low-tech industries — such as firefighting equipment, agricultural produce and traditional Chinese herbal cures — can support the military. Note that although the Communist Party has drastically cut back on its use of the term “military-civil fusion” in recent years — 2021’s 14th Five-Year Plan Outline omits the phrase entirely — this local plan continues to use this terminology.

If you have a foreign-language document related to security and emerging technologies that you’d like translated into English, CSET may be able to help! Click here for details.

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IN THE NEWS
What We’re Reading

Blog: Is the US going to screen outbound investment?, Sarah Bauerle-Danzman, Atlantic Council (January 2022)

Blog: China’s Share of Global Chip Sales Now Surpasses Taiwan’s, Closing in on Europe’s and Japan’s, Semiconductor Industry Association (January 2022)

Commentary: How U.S. Businesses View China’s Growing Influence in Tech Standards, Jacob Feldgoise and Matt Sheehan, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (December 2021) 

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