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Boston Globe
12 hours ago
- Business
- Boston Globe
Bipartisan bill seeks to ban Chinese AI from federal agencies, as US vows to win the AI race
Advertisement The ever-tighter race is now a central part of the US-China rivalry. And so much is at stake that the US must win, witnesses told the congressional panel. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up The two countries are 'in a long-term techno-security competition that will determine the shape of the global political order for the coming years,' said Thomas Mahnken, president and CEO of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. Jack Clark, co-founder and head of policy at Anthropic, told the committee that AI has built-in values. 'I know that AI systems are a reflection of the societies that are built from. AI built in democracies will lead to better technology for all of humanity. AI built in authoritarian nations will... be inescapably intertwined and imbued with authoritarianism,' Clark said. 'We must take decisive action to ensure America prevails.' Advertisement Earlier this year, Chris Lehane, OpenAI's head of global affairs, told reporters in Paris that the US and China were the only two countries in the world that could build AI at scale. The competition, which he described as one between democratic AI and autocratic AI, is 'very real and very serious,' and the stakes are 'enormous,' he said, for 'the global rails of AI will be built by one of those two countries.' The 2025 AI Index Report by Stanford University's Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence center has the US in the lead in producing top AI models. But the report notes China is rapidly closing the performance gap, reaching near parity in 2024 on several major benchmarks. It also shows that China leads in AI publications and patents. At the hearing, Clark urged the lawmakers to maintain and strengthen export controls of advanced chips to China. 'This competition fundamentally runs on compute,' he said. The US must control the flow of powerful chips to China, Clark said, 'or else you're giving them the tools they will need to build powerful AI to harm American interests.' Mark Beall, Jr., president of government affairs at The AI Policy Network, said there are 'a number of very glaring gaps' in the US export controls that have allowed China to obtain controlled chips. Lawmakers earlier this year introduced a bill to track such chips to ensure they would not be diverted to the wrong hands. In another legislative step, Republican and Democratic lawmakers in both the House and the Senate on Wednesday introduced a bill to ban Chinese AI systems in the federal government. Advertisement 'The US must draw a hard line: hostile AI systems have no business operating inside our government,' Moolenaar said. The No Adversarial AI Act, as proposed, seeks to identify AI systems developed by foreign adversaries and ban their use in the US government, with exceptions for use in research and counter terrorism.
NZ Herald
10-05-2025
- Politics
- NZ Herald
India loses two fighter jets in Pakistan strikes, experts confirm
The loss of multiple fighter jets would represent the worst setback in battle for India's air force in recent memory; in 2019, during the last round of fighting between the nuclear-armed neighbours, India acknowledged one of its jets was shot down by Pakistan. India's strikes inside Pakistan - launched in retaliation for a deadly militant attack on tourists last month in Indian-administered Kashmir - were the deepest in more than half a century; mutual accusations of drone attacks and border violations in the days that followed have brought the arch-rivals to the brink of full-scale conflict. 'There's a lot of political weight being put behind the planes because neither side has yet crossed a threshold of full-scale conventional warfare,' said Sameer Lalwani, a fellow at the D.C.-based Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. The Rafale, manufactured by the French company Dassault Aviation, is an advanced fighter aircraft first delivered to India in 2019 - one of the country's most significant purchases in recent years as it sought to modernise its air force and compete with regional powers like China. The word 'Rafale' is stencilled in white on the vertical stabiliser in one image of the wreckage, alongside the letters 'BS 001' and an Indian flag. The markings matched those on the vertical stabiliser of an Indian air force Rafale seen in images posted online in 2021. The Post could not independently geolocate the images of the wreckage, which were said to have been taken near the village of Akalia Khurd in Punjab, about 70km from India's border with Pakistan. But they did not appear to have been posted online before Wednesday, and local reports said Indian military authorities had responded to a crash in the area and collected the wreckage. One farmer was killed by a postcrash blast after being the first to reach the site, the Indian Express reported. Other photos taken in Wuyan, a village in Indian-administered Kashmir about 130km from the Pakistani border, showed what all three experts agreed was an external fuel tank belonging to a Mirage 2000, an older fighter aircraft also manufactured by Dassault that entered Indian military service in the 1980s. Fuel tanks can be jettisoned in response to a mechanical failure, combat damage or to make a jet more manoeuvrable in battle, so are not on their own proof of a crash. But just a quarter mile away, witnesses reported a plane crashing into a primary school soon after the Indian strikes began. Part of a jet engine is visible within the flaming wreckage of the school in a video posted the night of the attack, according to Ball and the French airpower expert, which suggests an aircraft went down there. Another video posted on Facebook by the school on Thursday showed schoolgirls picking up fallen tree limbs and commentators expressing hope it would be rebuilt. Another video, which the Post could not geolocate but which multiple accounts said was filmed near Akalia Khurd, showed an unexploded French-made Mica missile on the ground, still attached to its launcher, the experts said. Such a missile and launcher could be attached to either a Rafale or a Mirage, they said. 'These missile launch rails are attached to the aircraft, and it being on the ground, along with the large fire in the background indicates a crash likely occurred,' Ball said. The Post identified an apparent third crash site in Akhnoor, in Indian-administered Kashmir, based on videos and news reports from the day, but it was not possible to determine what type of aircraft was in the wreckage from the available visuals. Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said Pakistani planes never entered Indian territory and only shot down the Indian aircraft after they had 'delivered their payload'. Arzan Tarapore, a research scholar focusing on Indian military strategy at Stanford University, said India's silence on the planes was unsurprising. 'The Indian government during a crisis is typically very guarded about operational details,' he said. 'It's harder to be restrained and control the trajectory of the crisis if you admit to severe losses.'
