Washington:

US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said on Friday that the Biden administration is proposing to force US cloud companies to determine whether foreign entities are accessing US data centers to train AI models.

“We can’t have non-state actors or China or people we don’t want accessing our cloud to train our models,” Raimondo said in an interview with Reuters. “We use export controls on chips,” he said. “Those chips are in US cloud data centers so we also have to think about closing that avenue for potential malicious activity.”

The Biden administration is taking a series of measures to prevent China from using American technology for artificial intelligence, as the growing sector raises security concerns.

The proposed “Know Your Customer” regulation was released for public inspection on Friday and will be published on Monday. “This is a big deal,” Raimondo said.

The United States is “trying its best to deprive China of the computing power they want to train their (AI) models, but what good does it do if they can use our cloud to train their models.” Be taken?” He said.

Last month, Raimondo said Commerce would not allow Nvidia to send “the most sophisticated, highest-processing-power AI chips that would enable China to train its frontier models.”

The US government is concerned that China is developing advanced AI systems on various national security grounds and has taken steps to prevent Beijing from acquiring cutting-edge US technology to strengthen its military.

The proposal would require U.S. cloud computing companies to verify the identity of foreign individuals who sign up for or maintain accounts using U.S. cloud computing through a “Know Your Customer program or customer identification program.” Are. It will also set minimum standards for identifying foreign users and require cloud computing firms to certify compliance annually.

Raimondo said the burden should be on U.S. cloud computing companies “to know who their biggest customers are training the biggest models, and we’re trying to get that information. What will we do with that information? ?It depends on what we find.’

President Joe Biden signed an executive order in October requiring developers of AI systems that pose a risk to US national security, the economy, public health or safety to disclose the results of security tests to the US government before releasing them to the public. There was a need to share.

The Commerce Department plans to send those survey requests to companies soon. Raimondo told Reuters the companies would have 30 days to respond. “Any company that doesn’t want to comply is a red flag to me,” he said.

Carl Szabo, general counsel of NetChoice, a tech industry trade group, said Commerce is implementing Biden’s “illegal” executive order to force industry reporting requirements for AI. He said that requiring US cloud companies “to report the use of their resources by non-US entities for training large language models could hinder international cooperation.”

Top cloud providers include Amazon.com’s AWS, Alphabet’s Google Cloud and Microsoft’s Azure unit.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)