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The next era of global superpower competition: a conversation with the New York Times' David Sanger
Listen: In 2019, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin met at a summit and described their “friendship without limits.” But how close is that friendship, really? Should the US be worried about their growing military and economic cooperation? On the GZERO World Podcast, Ian Bremmer sits down with Pulitzer prize-winning national security correspondent for The New York Times David Sanger to talk about China, Russia, the US, and the 21st-century struggle for global dominance. Sanger’s newest book, “New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West,” looks at the new and increasingly unstable era of geopolitics where the US, China, and Russia are vying for power and influence like never before. Bremmer and Sanger discuss the US intelligence failures that led to the current geopolitical reality, what the US needs to do to combat the growing cooperation between our two biggest adversaries, and why semiconductor factories are more important to national security than aircraft carriers.
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Courtesy of Midjourney
Chinese national charged with stealing Google’s trade secrets
Image courtesy of Midjourney
Linwei Ding, a Chinese national residing in California, was arrested and indicted last Wednesday for allegedly stealing artificial intelligence-related trade secrets from Google and transferring them to his Chinese companies. Ding, who worked for Google, allegedly took more than 500 confidential files from his employer and used them in his work with two companies in China — one he founded, the other that recruited him and told investors he was the chief technology officer.
Neither Ding nor his lawyer have commented publicly on the case.
Bill Hannas, the lead at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology and a former expert at the CIA, said it’s both a case of an individual allegedly enriching himself by stealing valuable trade secrets and a threat to US national security.
“Known cases of outright theft, where China is the beneficiary, number in the hundreds,” Hannas said. But there have been tens of thousands of cases overall in which US technology ended up in China through unknown or obscured means, he added.
Eurasia Group’s Director of Geo-technology Xiaomeng Lu says it’s still unclear if there’s any direct involvement from the Chinese government in Ding’s case.
“Maybe the FBI has more information about the case that they haven’t revealed,” Lu said, “but what I have seen in media reports doesn’t explicitly suggest the stolen information has serious national security implications – chip and software design information reads more like trade secrets than national security secrets.”
The United States tries to restrict China’s access to valuable technology that would aid its efforts to develop sophisticated AI models and computing capabilities. Washington strengthened export controls over semiconductor technology earlier this year to cut off China from the kinds of high-powered chips necessary to run AI models.
“Export controls encourage China to find other ways to get what they need,” Hannas said. “Chips are an area where China is said to lag by comparison, but the other big deficit, acknowledged by top Chinese scientists themselves, is AI algorithms.” It’s more difficult to clamp down on scientific progress than specific materials, and this kind of corporate espionage is one way of gaining parity with the US.
Ultimately, Washington is concerned that China will one day outpace the American military with AI-powered autonomous weaponry. “The theft of innovative technology and trade secrets from American companies can cost jobs and have devastating economic and national security consequences,” FBI director Christopher Wraywrote in a press release.
The Justice and Commerce departments’ Disruptive Technology Strike Force, established last year, has focused on using export controls to cut off foreign adversaries including Iran and Russia, in addition to China. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco wrote that, as part of these efforts, the Justice Department will “relentlessly pursue and hold accountable those who would siphon disruptive technologies – especially AI – for unlawful export.”
A corporate espionage case targeting Google may be a ways away from delivering on that concern, but the government’s aggressive response signals a willingness to closely monitor any AI technology leaving the country — especially through illicit means.
If convicted, Ding will face up to 10 years in prison for each count.
An AI-generated image of swarming drones.
Robots are coming to a battlefield near you
Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing everything – from education, health care, and banking, to how we wage war. By simplifying military tasks, improving intelligence-gathering, and fine-tuning weapons accuracy — all of which could make wars less deadly – AI is redefining our concept of modern military might.
At its most basic level, militaries around the world are harnessing AI to train algorithms that can make their work faster and more effective. Today, it is used for image recognition, cyber warfare, strategic planning, logistics, bomb disposal, command and control, and more.
But there’s also plenty of debate over whether this could lead to killer robots and an apocalyptic endgame. Science fiction offers plenty of images of this – from Isaac Asimov’s rogue robots, the “Terminator” and Skynet, to Matthew Broderick racing to stop a supercomputer from unleashing nukes in “War Games.” Can we have less deadly wars without robots taking over the world?
Much of the concern about the future centers on lethal autonomous weapons, aka LAWs or killer robots, which are military tools that can target and engage in combat without human intervention. The weapons can be programmed to seek and destroy without a human steering them. LAWs could eventually become commonplace in war, and while critics have long campaigned to ban them and halt their development, militaries around the globe are exploring and testing this technology.
The US military, for example, is reportedly using an AI-powered quadcopter in operations, and early this year, the Air Force gave AI the controls of an F-16 for 17 hours.
During the first AUKUS AI and autonomy trial this spring, the UK tested a collaborative swarm of drones, which were able to detect and track military targets. And the US has reportedly developed a “pilotless” XQ-58A Valkyrie drone it hopes will “become a potent supplement to its fleet of traditional fighter jets, giving human pilots a swarm of highly capable robot wingmen to deploy in battle.” While the AI will help identify the targets, humans will still need to sign off before they shoot – at least for now.
Samuel Bresnick, a research fellow at Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology, says the potential uses of AI permeate all aspects of the military. AI can help the military “sift through huge amounts of information and pick out patterns,” he says, and this is already happening across the military’s intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems.
AI can also be used for advanced image recognition to aid military targeting. “For example, if the US has millions of hours of drone footage from the wars in the Middle East,” he says, “[they] can use that as training data for AI algorithms.”
AI can also help militaries plan hypersonic or ballistic missile trajectories — China reportedly used AI to develop a defensive system to detect such missiles.
There are innumerable other uses too, such as advancing cyber-espionage efforts and simplifying command-and-control decision-making, but the way militaries use AI is already garnering pushback and concern. Just last week, a group of 200 people working in AI signed an open letter condemning Israel’s use of “AI-driven technologies for warmaking, in which the aim is to make the loss of human life more efficient.”
World leaders like US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping are likewise concerned about the global adoption of AI-infused military tech, but that’s not slowing down their own efforts to gear up and gain a strategic advantage over one another.
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As the US ramps up its military capabilities, it is doing so as part of an AI arms race with China.
Last week, Biden and Xi met at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco, where they talked about artificial intelligence (among other things). The two world leaders “agreed to a dialogue to keep the [AI] from being deployed in ways that could destabilize global security.”
As AI becomes increasingly intertwined with their countries’ military ambitions and capabilities, Biden and Xi appear interested in keeping one another in check but are not in any rush to sign agreements that would prevent themselves from gaining a technological advantage over the other. “Both of these militaries want desperately to develop these technologies because they think it’s going to be the next revolution in military affairs,” Bresnick said. “Neither one is going to want to tie their hands.”
Justin Sherman, a senior fellow at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy and founder of Global Cyber Strategies, said he is concerned that AI could become the center of an arms race with no known endpoint.
“Thinking of it as a race …could potentially lead the US more toward an approach where AI systems are being built that really, as a democracy, it should not be building — or should be more cautious about building — but [they] are being built out of this fear that a foreign state might do what we do not,” Sherman said.
But with AI being a large suite of technologies, and one that’s evolving incredibly quickly, there’s no way to know where the race actually ends.
As AI plays an increasing role in the military destinies of both countries, Sherman says, there’s a risk of “the US and China constantly trying to one-up each other in the latest and greatest, and the most lethal technology just becomes more and more dangerous over time.”