US proposes sweeping actions to control data flow to China, 'Know your customer' regulation irks Beijing

The Biden administration in the US is looking to block avenues of high-end technology and data flow to China as reports suggest Beijing wants to use US data to create AI models. China's AI models made through domestic data from the US pose a major security threat for Washington DC.

The United States Biden administration is looking to move swiftly in order to protect their domestic data from Chinese companies. China reportedly is seeking data from top US companies to train their AI models which in turn could pose a national security threat for the United States. 

The US has already barred the trade of high-end computer systems to Beijing to halt Artificial Intelligence development in China. Nvidia, a prominent company in the global chip market, was forced to abandon the sale of its most sophisticated highest-processing-power AI chips to China. If the proposed sale had gone through, China was likely to use it to train their frontier models.

The US administration has been taking a series of steps to stop high-end technology and data flow to China. Its latest move in that direction is the proposed 'know your customer' cloud computing requirements. Under this regulation, companies in the US will need to verify the foreign users who sign up, maintain accounts, and use their cloud computing services. The verification will be mandatory and an annual report will be needed to submit to the US government based on the data collected. 

US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said, “We can't have non-state actors or China or folks who we don’t want accessing our cloud to train their model. We use export controls on chips. Those chips are in American cloud data centers so we also have to think about closing down that avenue for potential malicious activity.

US cloud computing companies should have the burden of knowing who their biggest customers are training the biggest models, and we're trying to get that information. What will we do with that information? It depends on what we find.”