Tag: Politics and Government

Trump White House Readies AI Framework to Review Security Risks

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In a meeting on Tuesday with top artificial intelligence companies, White House officials said the federal government planned to review only certain types of artificial intelligence models for potential security risks and not others, according to four people familiar with the discussions. The A.I. models the government plans to review are known as “closed” models, which do not publish their underlying code and are made by companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, according to three of the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the details of the meeting were…

The German Auto Industry, a Pillar of the National Psyche, Is Trembling

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The centerpiece of Mercedes-Benz’s 140th birthday party in January was a patent application filed in 1886 by an engineer named Carl Benz for a “vehicle with gas engine.” The way Mercedes executives spoke of the handwritten document, which at one point was projected on a large wall on the company campus in Stuttgart, Germany, it might have been a sacred parchment. It not only certifies that Germany is the birthplace of the automobile but also helps explain why the woes of the country’s automakers — Volkswagen, Mercedes and BMW —…

Beijing Protests After New Zealand Minister Insults Chinese-Born Lawmaker

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China has lodged a formal protest after New Zealand’s top diplomat told a Chinese-born lawmaker to “go back to your own country,” a comment that has also prompted calls at home for the minister’s dismissal. The foreign minister Winston Peters, leader of the populist New Zealand First party and a longtime political kingmaker in New Zealand, made the remarks during a heated debate in the Parliament in Wellington on Wednesday in a retort to Lawrence Xu-Nan, a Green Party lawmaker whose family had immigrated when he was a child. Responding…

China, Its Economy Stumbling, Signals Only Cautious Support

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Faced with weak consumer spending, persistently high youth unemployment and a tumbling stock market, China’s ruling Politburo signaled the need for stronger fiscal support and directed authorities to do more to tackle joblessness. In a broadly worded statement issued on Thursday after its annual midyear review of the economy, China’s Communist Party leadership urged the government to pursue “more proactive” tax and spending policies, and increase employment support. Politburo statements rarely detail specific policy measures, instead setting the broad direction for government action. Even by those standards, however, the statement…

This Is How America Trounces China in the A.I. Race

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The Chinese government has spent three years giving away its most capable artificial intelligence to anyone to use. That generosity was always temporary. Chinese authorities have reportedly been meeting with Alibaba, ByteDance and the start-up Z.ai to discuss restricting overseas access to some of China’s most advanced models — including systems that have not yet been released. The U.S. government’s instinct will likely be to answer with a ban of its own. That would be a mistake. The right response is the opposite: America and its allies should build and…

China Rewrites the ‘Soft Power’ Playbook for the A.I. Age

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In the Cold War era, “soft power” meant American movies and music that won hearts and minds abroad. Today, in the digital era, China is promoting a very different kind of soft power: its open, low-cost artificial intelligence technology. In a speech last week, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, described so-called open-source A.I. as key to China’s ambitions to shape the global development of the technology. Mr. Xi hailed open-sourcing, in which much of the software can be freely shared and modified, as a “rare and historical opportunity” to spread the…

Philippines Says Sailor Was Injured in Skirmish With Chinese Coast Guard

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The Philippine military accused China’s coast guard of injuring one of its sailors in a scuffle that broke out on Monday in the South China Sea, where the two countries have been locked in a decades-long territorial dispute. The episode began when an inflatable Chinese coast guard boat approached the Sierra Madre, a beached World War II-era warship that the Philippines uses as a military outpost in a disputed reef, and lashed out at the Philippine sailors who approached in a boat to chase them away, the Armed Forces of…

‘Suddenly, I Was Free’: A Chinese Pastor’s Journey From Jail to the U.S.

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The Chinese police officers hurried the pastor out of the jail cell where he’d been held for 266 days. They hustled him into a van, then onto a train — where he sat surrounded by about two dozen officers, many with cameras trained on him. The pastor, Jin Mingri, who founded one of China’s most prominent underground churches, wondered aloud if he was being transferred to a secret prison. An officer laughed and told him to think more positively. Hours later, Mr. Jin, who also goes by Ezra, had been…

Beijing Rejects Trump’s Claim of Meddling, but Avoids a Fight

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China on Friday rejected President Trump’s claim that it had meddled in American elections as baseless. But its response was relatively restrained, a sign that Beijing did not want to let the accusation derail a thaw in relations that both sides have spent months trying to preserve. Mr. Trump had said in a speech that China had carried out “the largest compromise of election data in history” starting with the 2020 cycle, one of several claims he made that was either overstated or untethered from reality. In Beijing, a foreign…

The Quest for ‘Technological Sovereignty’ in Europe (and Why It’s So Hard)

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The French government said this year that it would replace Zoom and other American videoconference software with a French-developed alternative. Germany is building a homegrown platform for artificial intelligence. Companies in both countries are teaming up to build A.I. chips to rival those of the United States and China. These are modest steps in Europe’s high-stakes race to catch up to America and China in the global sprint for digital independence. Without it, Europe’s political and business leaders worry, they will be vulnerable to sudden losses of access to critical…