Xi's AI Line at the White House — Transcript

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1. 0:00Always remains subject to control by
2. 0:02people. That's what President Xi Jinping
3. 0:04said about artificial intelligence at
4. 0:06the White House yesterday, and a remark
5. 0:08that came six days after CNN reported
6. 0:10that an AI model had nearly sent
7. 0:12American troops onto a Chinese ship. In
8. 0:14Beijing, the Chinese have an idea about
9. 0:16what control means. Since 2023, any AI
10. 0:20service offered to the Chinese public
11. 0:21must uphold socialist core values and
12. 0:24not produce content that incites
13. 0:26subversion of state power. All such
14. 0:28services must be registered with the
15. 0:30internet regulator before launch. As of
16. 0:32April, 868 had been filed. In the United
17. 0:35States, a machine's guess was treated as
18. 0:38real military intelligence. This spring,
19. 0:40during the strikes on Iran, a US
20. 0:42military analyst asked an AI model about
21. 0:44an unidentified Chinese ship. The model
22. 0:47merged open-source data with classified
23. 0:49intercepts and concluded that the ship
24. 0:51was carrying parts for nuclear weapons
25. 0:53to the Middle East. The analyst asked
26. 0:55the AI to write up the finding as an
27. 0:57intelligence report, which was then
28. 0:58distributed through normal military
29. 1:00channels. Troops began preparing to
30. 1:02board the ships, and planes were already
31. 1:05in the air when officials took a closer
32. 1:06look and concluded that the ship's cargo
33. 1:08had been misidentified. One source
34. 1:10described the report as entirely false.
35. 1:13Another said that it almost started a
36. 1:14war. A former senior official said that
37. 1:17the military's AI tools were mostly
38. 1:19copies of the commercial stuff wearing
39. 1:21lipstick. Two days after the report, the
40. 1:23Secretary of Treasury, Scott Bessent,
41. 1:25mentioned to Chinese Vice Premier He
42. 1:27Lifeng in New York the possibility of
43. 1:30setting up a mechanism for the two
44. 1:31countries to warn one another about AI
45. 1:33incidents. Marco Rubio talked about
46. 1:35nascent thinking about the equivalent of
47. 1:37a hotline that we had during the Cold
48. 1:39War. China's military has been worrying
49. 1:40about the same risk through its own
50. 1:42channels. Two days before the Trump-Xi
51. 1:44summit, the PLA Daily wrote that AI can
52. 1:46be the sharp sword, but not the hand
53. 1:48that holds it, and should not be the
54. 1:50finger that pulls the trigger on its
55. 1:51own. As of yesterday afternoon, the two
56. 1:53governments had not yet released a joint
57. 1:55statement on AI, and the hotline idea
58. 1:57was still just an idea. Senator Ed
59. 1:59Markey had asked Trump to get a renewed
60. 2:01commitment from Xi that a human being,
61. 2:03not a machine, would have final say over
62. 2:05launching nuclear weapons. No such
63. 2:07commitment was reported.