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Holly Chik

China will thwart US ambitions for global artificial intelligence (AI) dominance, the vice-president of the Centre for China and Globalisation has said, while warning that Washington’s military-focused strategy was pushing towards “AI for evil”.
Addressing the Penang Peace Dialogue in Malaysia on Sunday, Victor Gao said the US was “weaponising and militarising AI”, and integrating the technology into systems ranging from drones and ballistic missiles to everyday software and hardware.
This drive for hegemony posed a global risk, he argued.
The Centre for China and Globalisation, a Beijing-based non-governmental think tank, is an influential institution that provides research on international trade, global governance and China’s foreign relations.
“We should figure out a way to free us up from this attempted AI dominance,” Gao said, contrasting China’s open-source development to American closed-source strategies.
“China will never allow any country in this world to achieve AI dominance. That is why China is so committed to push forward AI leadership,” Gao said.
“China’s grip on rare earth control will deny the United States any chance of achieving AI for evil purposes,” he added. “China wants to break up that dominance. China wants to make sure that AI will be used for good, rather than be misused for evil.”
The race for AI supremacy has emerged as a critical geopolitical fault line beyond commercial competition. Analysts at Sunday’s forum warned that the development could redefine global stability.
They called for a shift towards multilateral cooperation and international AI governance frameworks to restrict the use of the technology for military purposes.
[US] purpose is to militarise artificial intelligence at a maximal rate
Jeffrey Sachs, Centre for Sustainable Development, Columbia University
American economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Centre for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, described the US as a country led by “the military-industrial-digital complex because the companies of Silicon Valley are intimately connected with the Pentagon”.
“The purpose is to militarise artificial intelligence at a maximal rate,” he said, echoing Gao.
“The American view is that it is going to use that technological and financial leverage that comes from a dollar-based international trading system to maintain its dominance in the rest of the world.”
Sachs dismissed this objective as a “delusion” that was “arithmetically, economically, financially and militarily impossible”.
He said the US did not have the necessary dominance to achieve this goal and that the centre of gravity had returned to Asia – which accounts for more than half the global growth and population.
Joanna Lei, chairwoman of the National Women’s League in Taiwan, cited mainland China’s top open-weight AI model Kimi K3 as a watershed moment that challenged the Western capitalist paradigm of technology development, even if it had yet to reach the cutting edge of US technology.
“From the Western point of view, you put huge resources behind some cutting-edge technology, you build dominance, and in this entire ecosystem, you are the rule-setter,” she said.


Citing the semiconductor industry as an example where top players dictated architecture, design and manufacturing standards, she said: “With that, you can tolerate high capital investment initially and even the deficit initially, because you will monetise later on.”
“But Kimi K3 changed that whole equation in a massive way,” Lei added, noting that the AI competition was shifting from a race for the most powerful model to a race for deployment at scale, creating two increasingly distinct development paths.
The Penang Peace Dialogue is a new annual international forum aimed at fostering peace and cooperation in a multipolar world. The two-day first edition that concluded on Sunday brought together roughly 200 academics, policymakers and business leaders from Asia and beyond.


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China

China’s grip on rare earths will deny US any chance of using ‘AI for evil’, Centre for China and Globalisation vice-president says in Penang


China’s grip on rare earths will deny US any chance of using ‘AI for evil’, Centre for China and Globalisation vice-president says in Penang.


China will never allow any country in this world to achieve AI dominance: Victor Gao

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}China’s grip on rare earths will deny US any chance of using ‘AI for evil’, Centre for China and Globalisation vice-president says in Penang

China’s grip on rare earths will deny US any chance of using ‘AI for evil’, Centre for China and Globalisation vice-president says in Penang