The U.S. Department of Commerce is planning new export restrictions on proprietary artificial intelligence models for advanced systems to safeguard the technologies from hostile exploitation. Sources told Reuters on Wednesday that any new export control would likely affect China, Russia, North Korea and Iran.
The plan supplements export limits already imposed on advanced AI chips to China to stem its military access to the technology.
According to Reuters’ sources, the restrictions could involve activating the computing power threshold to train an AI model, as defined under an executive order President Joe Biden issued in October. Under the EO, an AI developer has to report test results to the Commerce Department when the threshold is reached.
The U.S. research community fears powerful closed-source AI models, including OpenAI and Google DeepMind, falling into American adversaries. They said these tools, now available worldwide without government oversight, can process the vast data needed for a cyberattack or the development of a biological weapon.