So far this year, Gulf states have raised their spending on China to roughly $2.3 billion.
The White House has quietly addressed worries about Beijing’s increasingly close engagement with private enterprise in the Middle East, which could result in Chinese influence over powerful new artificial intelligence (AI) models.
“It’s very reminiscent of the Huawei issue where you have these technologies with 5G,” Dr. Georgianna Shea, the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracy, told Fox News Digital.
“Everyone’s using [5G], so that it becomes a backdoor into a lot of different systems within the United States,” she claimed. “AI provides the same opportunity when [China] collaborates with our allies:
They can participate in the creation process and perhaps skew some of the biases, or they can directly go through and extract intellectual property from what’s being put into the model.”
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In secret meetings with the UAE, the Biden administration made it plain that the oil-rich country should pay particular attention to links between Beijing and the Emirati business G42, which unveiled its Jais AI model – supposedly the most advanced Arab-language AI model.
Omar Sultan Al Olama, the Emirati Minister of Artificial Intelligence, stated at a recent summit that the Middle East must learn from past technological blunders, citing the printing press prohibition as an example of “over-regulation.”
According to the New York Times, the White House met with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, in June about G42’s ties to China during the sheikh’s visit to the United States.
China and the United States have spent the majority of the year competing for leadership in AI development, recognizing the technology’s current utility as well as its great potential to revolutionize industries and how individuals in different countries interact with the world around them.
G42 has grown dramatically in the last year as a result of relationships with various organizations, the most notable of which is one with OpenAI, the originator of ChatGPT, and its parent company Microsoft.
According to The Telegraph, Gulf states have upped their expenditure in China, increasing investment from $100 million in 2022 to a stunning $2.3 billion this year so far, despite the fact that the United States remains the region’s primary investment priority. Relations between the UAE and the US reached a stumbling block when US intelligence discovered China was secretly developing a potential military installation at an Abu Dhabi port, which the UAE terminated in response to Washington’s insistence.
A Chinese foreign ministry official downplayed US worries, saying it was just another attempt to “sabotage cooperation between Chinese companies and other countries,” which the US has done “on multiple occasions” through “economic coercion.”
Peng Xiao, the CEO of G42, revealed that the US has already begun putting pressure and making it obvious that the company “cannot do much more work with Chinese partners,” citing worries about the company’s handling of US data.
Despite the growing number of AI options developed in the United States, Shea pointed to TikTok, which has competitors in the United States but still has one of the largest active user bases of any social media platform operating in the country: Tiktok has the most daily minutes, while Meta has the most monthly active users, according to Statista.
In Rival IQ’s Social Media Industry Benchmark study on 2022 social media performance, an analysis of social media use and engagement revealed that TikTok offered higher engagement per post than those on social media platforms X and both Facebook and Instagram.
“TikTok is one of those types of technology that is… very prevalent,” Shea stated, claiming that “if people have the option to use an advanced tool, they will.”
“When you use AI, you put in your information, you put in your questions, you put in your search capabilities, and all of that then gets consumed into a data model,” Shea said. “Everything you had over into that query area is pretty much handed over.”
Shea expressed concern that despite the fact that “AI can be used for a lot of different things,” the United States is “struggling with its application.”
“Organizations, government, they don’t understand quite how to develop those policies, they’re not quite sure of the security implementation implications, so they haven’t laid out the best rollout for how we will use AI in a secure setting,” Shea said.
“If there is advanced technology and capabilities out there, then anyone who wants to be in that information-dominant space is going to vie for that ownership and control,” she stated.
