The global AI contest hits the UN

Politico

5 days ago

With help from Aaron Mak
The rivalry between the United States and China over who will dominate artificial intelligence has moved to an obscure battlefield: A Geneva-based United Nations agency most people have never heard of.
The Trump administration announced in June — a full year early — that it will push for a second term for American diplomat Doreen Bogdan-Martin as secretary general of the International Telecommunication Union, the organization that sets voluntary international standards for technology ranging from radio frequencies and broadband to 6G mobile phones.
This is the earliest the State Department has ever made this kind of push at the ITU, an indication of the growing urgency of the U.S.-China technological rivalry. The Trump AI Action Plan, released earlier this month, specifically names the ITU as key to America's global tech dominance. But some observers worry that Trump's tough-minded foreign policy approach may already be hurting the U.S. in its quest to keep Bogdan-Martin in office.
The ITU has been a great-power battleground before. In 2022, with Huawei turning telecom into a global contest, America and China waged a proxy battle for control over the agency. The Chinese backed Russian candidate Rashid Ismailov, a former Russian telecom minister who lost decisively to Bogdan.
Government and tech insiders say the stakes are even higher now because the ITU is setting standards for AI —more than 150 to date — for how governments and countries integrate the technology across existing operations. That's included standards for testing and evaluation of AI systems in areas like conversational AI tools and computer network diagnostics. So whoever controls the ITU will shape the global standards for AI development and integration.
Founded more than 150 years ago to standardize telegraph systems, the ITU today includes the U.N.'s 193 members along with representatives of corporations including AT&T, China Unicom, Nokia and Sony. Over the years, the agency has become central to the growth of telecom technology, negotiating international agreements on everything from radio spectrum allocations to the orbital paths of satellites in outer space. ITU added AI to its suite of technologies with the launch of its AI For Good program in 2017.
U.N. members vote every four years to select the agency's secretary general, and that vote has grown more loaded each election.
Bogdan-Martin's predecessor, China's Houlin Zhao, developed a reputation among Americans of using his position to bend the ITU toward Beijing.
'What you saw over and over again was him trying to align the ITU with endorsing Chinese technology and downplaying U.S. complaints about the potential for security breaches by using ZTE or Huawei technology, or endorsing Chinese Belt and Road Initiative telecommunications projects in developing countries,' said Brett Schaefer, an expert on the U.N. at the American Enterprise Institute, and a former member of U.N. General Assembly's Committee on Contributions.
The U.S. blacklisted Huawei and ZTE in 2020 as 'companies posing a national security threat'.
China's Washington embassy and New York U.N. mission did not answer DFD's questions. Nor did the State Department or Bogdan-Martin. Beijing hasn't announced if it will contest Bogdan-Martin's renomination.
In some respects, the U.S. is at the apex of its technological prowess. Nvidia and Microsoft both reached valuations above $4 trillion, making them the wealthiest companies in world history. Trump's AI Action Plan, released in July, is in part a call to keep the U.S. dominant by exporting American technology around the world. Notably, for a White House that rejects much of the world order, it calls for the U.S. to leverage its positions in international bodies, including the ITU.
'Everyone in the world should be using our technology, and we should make it easy for the world to use it,' White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios said last week in Washington.
Observers say Bogdan-Martin's early re-entry into the race shows American officials are wary of China's growing influence. Bogdan-Martin easily defeated her rival in 2022, but Mark Lambert, a State Department veteran of the Biden and first Trump administrations, anticipated Bogdan-Martin's rivals would start their campaign ahead of time as well.
'If the Chinese and Russians are crafty, they'll find a like-minded candidate from Africa or Latin America to put forward to line up lesser developed country votes,' said Lambert.
Mark Beall, who directed AI strategy in the Pentagon in the first Trump administration, said the U.S. would likely contest China's influence by appealing to the same voters from the lesser developed world, with the early announcement giving 'time to counter potential infrastructure-for-votes deals that some competitors might offer.'
Recent signals in the wonky world of global telecom diplomacy may give the U.S. some cause for concern. Daniel Baer, who served as ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe under former President Barack Obama, said Trump's tariffs and slashing of foreign aid might be alienating potential ITU votes. 'In much of the world, there's probably less interest in doing favors for the United States than there might have been a year ago,' he said.
In June, the ITU voted on the location of the agency's World Radio Conference, planned for 2027. Although Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick pitched Washington to host the confab, members voted instead to hold the event in Shanghai.
'That's not the outcome that the United States wanted,' said Fiona Alexander, a senior telecoms official in the Commerce Department from 2008 to 2019, during both the Obama and Trump administrations. 'We need to get serious. We need to get organized. There's a long-term play in all of these institutions because it's all about coalition building'.
Privacy hawks hound the TSA over facial recognition
Privacy-minded Senate Republicans are accusing the Transportation Security Administration of interfering with a bill to make airport screenings less intrusive, POLITICO's Benjamin Guggenheim reported Sunday.
Senate Commerce Chair Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said he'd delay consideration of the bill last Tuesday, which would have required the TSA to notify passengers of their ability to opt-out of facial recognition scans and put checks on the storage of biometric data collected in the process. The bill was subject to intense opposition from the travel industry, but Republicans also grumbled about the TSA's involvement.
When asked if the TSA raised concerns about the bill, co-sponsor Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said, 'The short answer is yes; the long answer is hell yes.' He added, 'They're working like an ugly stripper to kill this bill, which tells me we're doing the right thing.' A senior Senate GOP aide also told POLITICO that the 'smears against [the] bill have TSA's fingerprints all over it.'
The TSA did not respond to POLITICO's inquiries on the matter.
Delta says its AI is not using our data to set prices
Delta Air Lines is denying that it uses personal data to set 'individualized' airfares, POLITICO's Alfred Ng reports.
The airline made the claims in a letter that the company sent on Friday to Sens. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Mark Warner (D-Va.), in response to their questions about its pricing practices. Peter Carter, Delta's chief external affairs officer, wrote in the letter, 'Our AI-powered pricing functionality is designed to enhance our existing fare pricing processes using aggregated data.'
This response doesn't seem to have allayed the senators' concerns. 'If Delta is in fact using aggregated instead of individualized data, that is welcome news,' Gallego said in a statement. 'But it still begs the question: why did their president brag to their investors about their desire to 'get you the right offer in your hand at the right time'?' Warner wrote in an X post on Friday that 'many questions remain.'
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