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AI United States Government

The US Government Begins Limiting Some Exports of AI Software (theverge.com) 71

Posted by EditorDavid from the ending-exports dept.
"The Trump administration will make it more difficult to export artificial intelligence software as of next week, part of a bid to keep sensitive technologies out of the hands of rival powers like China," reports Reuters.

The Verge has more details: The ban, which comes into force on Monday, is the first to be applied under a 2018 law known as the Export Control Reform Act or ECRA. This requires the government to examine how it can restrict the export of "emerging" technologies "essential to the national security of the United States" -- including AI... When ECRA was announced in 2018, some in the tech industry feared it would harm the field of artificial intelligence, which benefits greatly from the exchange of research and commercial programs across borders. Although the U.S. is generally considered to be the world leader in AI, China is a strong second place and gaining fast. But the new export ban is extremely narrow. It applies only to software that uses neural networks (a key component in machine learning) to discover "points of interest" in geospatial imagery; things like houses or vehicles...

[S]uch software is of growing importance to military intelligence, too. The U.S., for example, is developing an AI analysis tool named Sentinel, which is supposed to highlight "anomalies" in satellite imagery. It might flag troop and missile movements, for example, or suggest areas that human analysts should examine in detail.
The rule only applies in America, reports Reuters, "but U.S. authorities could later submit it to international bodies to try to create a level playing field globally."
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The US Government Begins Limiting Some Exports of AI Software More

The US Government Begins Limiting Some Exports of AI Software

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  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday January 05, 2020 @07:12PM (#59590320)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Any practical system of this kind goes well beyond "papers": it's a complete system, and the actual AI is maybe 10% of it, if that. Up until now there was nothing in place to prevent the export of something like the DOD's Maven project that Google employees were so butthurt by. It's ridiculous: I can't export a holographic rifle sight (which is available worldwide nowadays, and is, by itself, non-lethal), but I could export drone based military surveillance systems just fine, so as long as they aren't built

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Any practical system of this kind goes well beyond "papers"

        It does. But mostly you just need your own experts to adapt the results to your use-case. And to keep said experts current, "papers" are more than enough. Especially when your experts are active researchers in the area as well.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      The only thing this will do is that the US will be laboring under restrictions in this research area, while the rest of the world will not. It is absolutely clear what the effect will be. The the orange moron at work again.

      • A lot countries ban the export of military equipment. I wouldn't say that war technologies have labored in those countries as a result.

    • Re: Oh yeah, this will totally work. (Score:5, Funny)

      by PolygamousRanchKid ( 1290638 ) on Sunday January 05, 2020 @08:09PM (#59590432)

      Because as we all know, Chinese computer scientists can't do math or read research papers.

      Of course they can. This is why the US government is also blocking the export of Chinese computer scientists from the US to China.

      However, US intelligence services have also confirmed that China is producing Chinese computer scientists on its own, by illegally using US Intellectual Property.

      Young Chinese couples are forced to watch ancient, streamed and illegally pirated reruns of "Love, American Style". This induces them to get married and have Chinese computer scientist babies.

      The World Trade Organization (WTO) is unable to intervene, because, for them, "Love, American Style" is defined as "Do it in the dark, with your clothes on".

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Chromal ( 56550 )
        Work done at US academic research institutions does not "belong to the US" any more than my undergraduate term papers "belong to the US." Just another fascist move to wrongfully coerce the entire free world closer to psychopathic hard-right war wet dreams of a failed US Federal government, an imperious military-industrial complex deep state, and a vast fascist criminal conspiracy that goes right up to the Highest Office in the Free World.

    • Oh, it's better than that. The image recognition AI tech they're talking about, not only does China already have it, but they're already selling it to us in consumer products. DJI's drones have been able to recognize and track objects for awhile now (not to mention, one of their smaller models can identify and land itself automatically in your outstretched hand).

      Taking your ball and going home ain't gonna work when the other side has their own ball factories and plenty of balls to go around.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        Doing it real well though, does require some lateral thinking and the nature of societies transport structures. So first is narrow band multi spectrum imaging, focusing in on particular bands of light wavelengths to obtaining different image data, you know infrared, ultraviolet, normal, or further out bands, machines can we not but that image can be translated into something we see. By combining the different natures of the different bandwidths and correlating the data, not just to focal points but their ap

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          What you're describing is, I think, satellite hardware. The US definitely doesn't share its spy sat hardware, with good reason.

          Once you get the pixels, the AI analysis is pretty straightforward. The whole point is that you give it the data, give it some examples of what you want, and it figures out how to go from one to the other.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      It's not even that hard. Making something to identify features of interest in an image is a matter of taking any of a zillion tutorials and substituting the data you're interested in.

    • "Because as we all know, Chinese computer scientists can't do math or read research papers. That's why they don't have computers in China."$

      They are leading in China anyway.
      The Chinese have their social grading, pay everything with their phone, all their communications are read, no privacy laws to speak of ..., the Chinese researchers have data to train their AIs on the the US can only dream of.

    • See H265 and AV1 with prediction frames. Beats XOR or photographic transfers on to of originals. If we are talking MCAS, that's an AI that USA wants to export. How dare Airbus have performance envelopes.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Matheus ( 586080 )

      U.S. Export controls are a funny beast but whatever.. this isn't new so they don't need to "find out" whether it works or not they already know.

      Not a great example because it relates to the handling of Classified materials not export controls but works as a corollary:
      The math/physics behind making an atomic bomb were not exactly secret during WWII but the US turned that into functional weapons before anyone else. Those other nations had their own people working on the problem and eventually got there but th

    • The ./ post is overly broad to the point of making it sounds like this is some overarching ban, while the article is pretty clear this is specific to one case:

      export certain types of geospatial imagery software

      Not that different from saying you can't sell schematics and material specifications to sanctioned countries for missile technology or stealth.

  • with no skynet Russia an mass first strike can win

  • Back to the Clipper chip (Score:3, Informative)

    by Snotnose ( 212196 ) on Sunday January 05, 2020 @07:30PM (#59590350)
    Good ol' boy Billy C tried this with encryption and the Clipper chip back when I was young enough to care. He and his cabal failed for obvious technical reasons.

    So, is Trump really stupid enough to retry a failed Clinton policy? Don't answer that, Trump is so fucking clueless it boggles the mind.

    • Good ol' boy Billy C tried this with encryption and the Clipper chip back when I was young enough to care.

      The Clipper Chip has now been replaced by the Intel Management Engine.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Quiet! This means more AI research jobs for Europe! Don't tip him off!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Quiet! This means more AI research jobs for Europe! Don't tip him off!

        Oops. You are right, of course.

        • Actually I really wonder where this USA versus China thing is coming from ...
          If anyone in the US really believes China considers the USA an enemy, he is an complete idiot. Well, after the Huwaei CFO issue, probably they consider ... but China is: just China, they are a sleeping Elephant and for some stupid reason the US are throwing stones at it.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by gweihir ( 88907 )

            I think this is a very old thing. Trump rides on the message that the US needs to be made "great again" (whether true or not) and that traditionally comes with an enemy that must be the one responsible tot the current (real or perceived) lack of "greatness". So for some reason he settled on China. But it is not the full form either. He probably believes if he styles them as much as possible as the "enemy" without actually starting a war, they will eventually bow to his superior person and accept a "deal" fr

    • The main problem is that current state-of-the-art encryption makes use of the Chinese Remainder Theorem.
      The theorem is known to have spied on system that are based on it, so it must be purged from all systems.
      Now, did anyone see where I left my Cardan grille ?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Shotgun ( 30919 )

      Why would this get pinned on Trump? There was a law passed. FTS:

      The ban, which comes into force on Monday, is the first to be applied under a 2018 law known as the Export Control Reform Act or ECRA.

      There are nearly 600 members in the Legislative Branch that approved this. Yes, there are literally 600 people that are stupid enough to retry the failed Clinton policy. Clinton also had 600 stupid people behind him. And, here is what really sticks in the craw, many of them are the same stupid people.

  • So do they really think they can do that crap again? I seem to recall back before the 2000s a cryptography "munitions export" prohibition... Because the content of books is protected by the 1st Amendment and cannot be subject to export restrictions (As affirmed later in other cases by two federal circuit courts that cryptographic software source code is speech protected by the First Amendment).

    Zimmerman thus had PGP's complete buildable source code printed into book form published by MIT Press, and the

    • They can. The Trump government has been actively enforcing export controls in a really stupid way. For example, Airbus recently shut down their electric plane program in Sunnyvale because of technology export problems.

      Dumb as bricks. Information should be free.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      I had never heard about a book. I think I still have my t-shirt with the RSA equation on it though.

  • I sometimes wonder who is delusional... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by bogaboga ( 793279 ) on Sunday January 05, 2020 @07:40PM (#59590366)

    ...part of a bid to keep sensitive technologies out of the hands of rival powers like China...

    This requires the government to examine how it can restrict the export of "emerging" technologies "essential to the national security of the United States"

    I wonder why the USA thinks this approach will work given that a similar approach has spectacularly failed at stemming China's 5G intellectual assets even within USA's patent system for instance.

    Some quarters say that one cannot implement 5G without core Chinese technology - meaning that a company like Huawei can simply sit back and earn from 5G licensing fees. The Chinese must be looking on an laughing. at a system that just does not get it.

    • Preventing the flow of information only slows technology growth for everyone. It still gets done, just not the way the censor wants it to happen.
  • AI is already being used for fairly dystopian stuff like facial recognition as part of the social credit system in china. If we had done this earlier, maybe some of that could have been slowed or made more difficult. As it is, hopefully it might prevent some stuff in the future. Not to mention potentially giving US tech companies a small competitive advantage.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by HiThere ( 15173 )

      What decade do you mean by earlier? It would need to have been back around the time that "Perceptrons" was printed, or possibly a few decades earlier.

      As it is, this move will only help China. The pres. has been studiously antagonizing everyone who used to feel friendly towards us, and being an unreliable trading partner to all and sundry. I don't know whether he's a Russian agent, or whether he's really that stupid.

    • More likely this will give Chinese companies an advantage over the US ones, because they won't be affected by the restrictions. While this legislation is pretty narrow, it will present the appearance that US vendors can be randomly restricted by the government, and therefore not as reliable as an investment. China is already exporting facial recognition tech abroad, and might now become a leader in drone image analysis software as well (that's really what the application here is for customers without fleets

  • Does anyone know how this will effect open source libraries?

  • Apparently the US Government still doesn't quite understand how things work:

    1) Foreign government sends foreign national to US to attend school.
    2) Ensure foreign national gets selected for employment at facility that does research on area of interest.
    3) Claim racism if anyone objects to having a foreign national working on USG classified programs. ( directly or indirectly )
    4) Reap the rewards of having spies in every sector of sensitive programs.
    5) Bonus - Laugh at all the money saved on Research and

  • No, it's speech, not "munitions", and you can't legislate it to be otherwise if being intellectually/legally honest. 'course, the Supremes have said growing your own veggies is Interstate Commerce, so what ya gonna do about it?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Hmm. Does this mean the respective software has to be exported as printed book (again)?

  • and why exactly would any international bodies accept such limitations? (unless the US is waving the sanction stick) they would be incredibly harmful for the rest of the world while benefiting only the US (at least until they are surpassed which is likely to happen a lot faster with these rules)

  • Data is not, and never will be a phyiscal good.

    Now tell me, how could you even tell, if e.g. somebody in the US copied the files to China over a VPN, and nobody ever told you. Theoretically, all of China could have a copy and never tell you. Hell, in some scenarios, the sharing can happen literally outside your light cone [wikipedia.org], making it /physically impossible/ to prevent.

    Not that it mattered if you found out.
    Yeah, "punishing" that somebody, even if
    in the unlikely scenario that you find out who he is, won't undo

  • They'd be better off restricting hardware, without powerful GPU's you can't do the research, the neural networks (if you can call that AI) is already out the door, but still requires powerful GPU's to do interesting things

  • The US Government has *always limited export of most if not all AI-related technologies.. This applies to the recurring rule of article authors (and just about everyone else) not understanding what "AI" really is but to be very clear I used to work for a company operating in that space and everything we did was very tightly export controlled. (also falling into the category of things people don't understand: "Everything" is "Export Controlled".. just some things are more restricted than others)

    SO The correc

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